Week 12, Lesson 27, The End

The End.  Hard to believe we’re here.  What comes next?  Hard question.

I think I’ve been suggesting some things in my earlier posts.  I don’t see us putting up another lengthy training program, but I do see more individual things happening.  Wouldn’t it be cool for someone to say “hey, we ought to do this.”  Or, ‘let’s do this on the reference desk”.  I think staff is more aware now of what might be possible.  In fact, some of that is happening.  There’s IM at the Reference Desk.  LibraryThing is coming to the Catalog.  There’s going to be more emphasis on photo, podcast and video sharing.  What about a wiki at the desks, maybe to complement the red book.  I think we also have to remember that lots of staff don’t have easy access to a computer.

We’ve talked about putting up a Sunnyvale cookbook on Del.icio.us after our session on Restaurants and Recipes at Staff Development Day.  Maybe the librarians will try it for their bookmarks and see if it’s any easier/faster to find them.

What about highlighting one new technology per quarter?  Maybe that would be easier for staff to handle.  Ask for volunteers to suggest a new thing to learn.  Or, just go to the Web 2.0 awards site and pick one.  Learn about all four and get a certificate for a cookie or ice cream cone.  There’s that prize again.

Gather up everyone’s suggestions and share them with staff.  Maybe that might pique the interest of other staff members.   

Go to training offered by others.  Be open minded.  Keep learning.

Week 12, Lesson 26, Tell us what you think

It’s hard to believe I’m at the end of the program.  Even though I’m a big believer in this training, I found it hard to find the time to do the exercises and so had to “catch up” for the whole program.  I did all the work at home as there was just no time at work.  I think that this might have been a problem for many people-not enough time at work.  Though I also think if they really wanted to do it, they would have.  The perception was that it was just too hard, too time consuming-at least this is some of what I was hearing.  So, how could we improve?  Perhaps the next similar type of training will be shorter, not so many lessons so it won’t seem so daunting.  I do think we should try to do some similar training.  We’ve been talking about library learning 2.1, but I think that will almost have to come from the participants themselves.  Perhaps we’ll focus on one new technology in the future and try that.

I would always tell myself to participate in a program like this.  We need to keep learning, to keep up with what’s going on technology wise and keep up with our patrons.  We want the library to evolve and stay relevant, especially with the new users coming up.  This program was the impetus I needed to actually go out and experiment with new stuff out there.

I don’t know that I had a favorite, though LibraryThing is up there.  As I said before, I always wanted to catalog my own books and maybe now I will.  But, I’m also very interested in how LibraryThing will be accepted and used on our catalog.

The RSS was cool too.  I like that I can suggest various “lessons” to friends that I think might be helped by them.  Sort of like me being on my reference desk.  I liked the web 2.0 awards because I was exposed to so many more technologies and could think about how they would be useful.  Isn’t all learning somewhat of a surprise?  A good surprise?  And fun.  The training was fun.  You’d start to do a lesson and get caught up and spend hours, sometimes, just looking and trying things out.  Help was there and available.  For me, I would rather actually have a conversation with someone when I have a question, the back and forth and immediate followup is what I prefer.  But, again, the help was terrific.

I’m glad Sunnyvale took the time to devote to setting up and administering these training lessons, and I’m especially glad that so many people at least started/or finished.  It can only be good for them and for the Library.  Thanks.

Week 11, Lesson 25, eBooks

The Califa collection is a very popular one, especially the Overdrive audio ebooks.  That’s the most popular collection.  Sometimes frustrating because so many are checked out and have long waiting lists.  Luckily you can search for just the available copies.  I’ve always preferred the book, but this format does have a lot going for it.

Week 11, Lesson 23, YouTube

YouTube is an amazing phenomena.  Who would have ever guessed it would be so huge?  The library could do a lot with it-storytimes, program snippets, building progress (maybe…).  What fun to just poke around.  One could spend lots of time here.

I’m going to try and imbed a video.  I copied the url and pasted it in and sent it to the editor.  Here it is, but it doesn’t show up like it should.  Oh, that’s because I’m in write mode.  It’s okay on the blog.  Cool.

Red Hot Flames

Week 11, Lesson24, Podcasts

In searching the directories mentioned for podcasts, I was pleased to see that Sunnyvale’s podcasts are listed.  I listened to John Pilger interviewing Deborah Barrow about the library of the future, which I found on Podcast.net.  This was very easy to do as I only had to click on play. 

Podcastalley had more than 100 podcasts on Library 2.0., but you couldn’t play them directly, but had to go get it and take it to your aggregator.  

It does seem that video is taking over.

Week 10, Lesson 22, Choose your own adventure

I chose the Web 2.0 Award Winners.  Just scrolling through all of them is an eye opener.  It was not surprising to see so many of our “lessons” represented.  Many of these could be offered at the Reference Desk to patrons-health, business, marketing, travel and on.

We’re already using Meebo  wwwl.meebo.com/index-en.html, but I’m hoping we can expand its use.

The 43 things www.43things.com is just for fun.  Why is it everyone is in to making lists?  Because it’s fun and gives you things to try and achieve in your life. 

Medstory  www.medstory.com could be used in conjunction with our health database.  It’s easy to type in a condition and see what comes up.  However, there are so many hits, that it’s impossible to go through them all.  I’m not sure what controls what is cited first.

 www.healia.com/healia could be very helpful at the reference desk because you can search specificially for clinical trials. 

http://www.etsy.com/ is a site where you can buy or sell handmade goods.  Good place for gift shopping!

The travel sites are interesting.  Farecast  farecast.com predicts when’s a good time to travel for low fares-at least for 75 cities. 

Marketing is always a hot topic.  Maybe iContact   www.icontact.com  would be helpful for patrons with their own businesses, especially.

Well, that’s enough for now.

Week 10, Lesson 21, The labs of Google

As expected, Google has a lot going on.  Web 2.0 moves so fast, it’s got to be about beta.  Google is certainly looking at lots of things in Google labs.  The Google Mars is pretty cool, and a good place for a student to go looking for the history of spacecraft landings and various geographical features on the planet.  Lots of links to stories.

Google Suggest is pretty cool too.  I started to type in my search terms, and it filled them in, suggesting many different headings.  Fun to see what else I might be interested in that I hadn’t really thought about.  A little bit like the lost serendipity of the card catalog.

I know we teach about Google labs in our extreme Google class.  Good to share this with as many people that might be interested.  They might in turn help Google with info. 

Week 10, Lesson 20, Online applications & tools

I can see how having these applications on the web can make it a lot easier for people to use and share.  Plus, it’s free.   From the testimonials given for Google docs, it seems there is more use for the sharing of spreadsheets.  However, I just set up a short word doc.  Google Docs was fairly intuitive, but Zoho had much better explanation and seemed easier to use.  I did have some questions about folders in Zoho.  I get that Tags are folders, and I clicked on tag and set up my “folder”, but I couldn’t seem to get it over to the left and I’m not sure my doc is in it. 

Again, the main beauty of these aps is that you can share them.  A whole lot less emailing here.  Perhaps this would be helpful for the Library’s RTC process since there are so many copies going back and forth after revisions are made.

Week 9, Lesson 19, Library 2.0

Library 2.0-what this series of lessons is really all about.  I read the articles and they do bring into focus where we are and what we need to be doing.  Away from icebergs hits close to home.  I can relate to “just in case” collections, though I do think we have been trying to make our collection more relevant to what users are using and we are adding more formats for them.  The high usage of our ebook collection tells us we are reaching at least some of our patrons using new technologies.  Even though we still do user education, and should, we need to focus on making our resources easy to use.  Patrons will not always come to librarians to ask questions, and perhaps they really don’t need to if we make our site easier enough to use.  We are not the only game in town, and we need to adapt to that concept.

And, I think with these lessons, we’re trying to get all staff to at least sample some of the web 2.0 tools that are out there and that we need to use to stay relevant to our public.  I think we’ll all have to adjust more quickly to this world as it is zooming along.  We can’t study something to death before trying it.  On the same hand, we’re not going to jump on every bandwagon.  We always have and always will keep the patron’s needs in the forefront.

I think we’re starting to use Web 2.0 applications in the library.  Innovative is offering new products that have patron interactivity and more collaboration.  We’re moving ahead to get LibraryThing for the catalog.  I think it would be cool if we could use Endeca.  I saw a presentation with Andrew Pace, from NC State, and it was a very impressive product.  We need to start using our federated search more here too.  After we do our next upgrade, that would be the time to go back to it and encourage its use.

Week 9, Lesson18, Search Engines

Rollyo and Google search engines both work well.  I really wanted to like Rollyo better, but the advertising and sponsored sites turn me off.  Plus, it makes it harder to go through your true hits.  It also seemed that the results came back a little quicker with Google, though that could be my computer.  One nice thing about Google, after you search you have the option of further limiting the search by searching just those results.

How could this be used in the library?  If we’re doing a particular program, we could create a custom search engine of suggested sites around the program, for instance on small business.  If you wanted to keep up with certain library blogs you could set up a custom search.  However, it seems the RSS feed might be better for that, but this would be another alternative.  I wonder if we could set up a search for library supplies and be able to search and compare different vendor offerings? 

I just set up a google search engine on library supply vendors:  http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=012995203987614420735%3Azgtz8d8kmue

However, it doesn’t do what I want.  When I searched “book jackets”, it only took me to Gaylord listings.  It doesn’t go to the specific page of the catalog for the product.  Well, I just wanted to try it though I knew the chances of search success were limited.  Also, even though I asked to search just my sites, I do have sponsored links.  At least these are off to the side, and not integrated into the search hits as they were for Rollyo.