The Long Journey

I really enjoyed doing the 23 things over the last few weeks. The biggest problem that I had with the program was its timing. The end of it fell right in line with the beginning of summer and, being a children's associate, wished the timing had been NOT during a story time session. I love YouTube and really enjoyed the image generator exercises. Flickr was cool to browse through too.

Some future ideas:

post more at one time so when you do have the time to catch up, you can

choose a time when youth service people won't be in story time

only have 2-3 things to do each week instead of having some weeks with 1 thing and some weeks with 4

That is about all. I would definitely participate if we were to do this again. Hopefully we will have good incentives again as well.

Sense and Sensibility

I am a big Jane Austen fan so I listened to an excerpt of Sense and Sensibility. I liked the woman that was reading, Nadia May. I noticed that she also reads Pride and Prejudice on the site. When I tried to preview that one, the majority of what it says in "chapter 1" is instead information about copyright laws and what needs to be done to return the item to your library. I found that pretty amusing. The audio sounded a little off but I thought that it was cool that people can download books from our website. I know several patrons that enjoy this resource already.

Podcast Alley

I continue to find cool podcasts put out by people I know or just people that I share views with. I browsed through Podcast Alley, which I find very user friendly for what you want to find. I also looked for book reviews. I found one that I would have liked to add as an RSS feed (Book Snark) to bloglines but the link did not work through podcast alley OR through bloglines...so the search was on again. I ended up choosing "The Great Read Radio Show". I am not a big reader of regular fiction-I much prefer YA stuff but I thought that a podcast like this would definitely help to strengthen RA for the patrons. Podcasts are good as long as the person (or people) know what they are doing.

Super Mario Brothers

I love the live-action video for Super Mario Brothers that you can see if you just go to youtube and type in "Super Mario Brothers". It is the first thing that pops up. If you are a fan, I would definitely recommend checking it out if you haven't seen it already. I tried to embed the video but I couldn't get it to take. Anyway, I think its fun. I love that you can also watch clips from shows and a lot of funny stuff that you can find. We tried looking for "ghosts" one time and some of the things that come up are HILARIOUS! You could definitely spend hours and hours on YouTube.

Galaxiki.org

I started off looking for a site with games and entertainment. I chose the 1st place winner in the category : Zango.com. Well, it is blocked by our filters...even though I have a password to override, I was reluctant because of the reasons WHY it was blocked (yeah, including pornography). Nice. So, I opened up the 2nd and 3rd place sites to see if they were blocked as well. Doof.com wasn't blocked but it wanted me to install activex control on the computer...which doesn't work because I do not have the authority...strike #2. SO, 2nd place winner Galaxiki.org was the only one that seemed to go off without a glitch. I am glad that I stuck with the games and entertainment category. Galaxiki is a fun wiki site which lets its members change information about stars in the galaxy. You can use the browser to "beam" you to a random star or "wormhole" to a random location in the galaxy. You are also able to "buy" stars as gifts and name them in honor of other people. I like the way that the site is presented. It's user friendly and fun. If you like space, I would definitely recommend this for an interesting stress reliever.

Zoho

I really like Zoho writer. I published my "Ode To Shoes" from their site. I think its beneficial to have everything on one screen and I find it more fun than Microsoft Word documents. One thing that I specifically enjoyed was the word count that pops up once the document is saved. I will defintely use this in the future.

Shoes

Ode to New Shoes

 

I really like my new shoes

They are so stylish

I got them at Famous Footwear

Their price was divinish

 

I have but only one wish

As this day goes on

I hope my toes don't cramp

Until I am gone

PBCLSWiki

I really thought this was fun. Only complaint-it seems like one too many steps to add a link to your blog or even to one of your fave things. I think it could be a little easier and more user friendly. I added my blog and information about my fave vacation spots (since it is summer after all). It is always cool just to play around with things and see what other people have to say.

Wiki Mania

When I first started exploring wiki's a while back, I didn't like them at all. I thought that there had to be a better way to get out certain information that just letting anyone contribute. However, sites like Wikipedia, have helped to somewhat change my perspective. I like the idea of different users being able to put their 2 cents in but I don't like that you can find information that is completely incorrect. I wish there was a better way to make sure that the info you are getting from these wikis is right. Library systems could definitely benefit from a wiki. I think genealogy research would work especially well with a wiki. I could actually see any type of research for school working well from a wiki. However, in the case of Wikipedia, always remember just because you see it in print doesn't make it true.

Librarian 2.0

Although I am not technically a "librarian", I find myself doing many of the duties of a librarian because I work in the children's department. We do a lot of RA and try to come up with ways to make children want to read and come to the library. IMO-The most interesting line in this article by Michael Stephens is "Librarian 2.0 also listens to staff and users when planning, tells the stories of successes and failures, learns from both, celebrates those successes, allows staff time to play and learn, and never stops dreaming about the best library services". I think we put too many time constraints and "rules" on a job that we are 100% better at when we are having FUN! It seems like we only hear what we want to hear...and that is usually the negative stuff. That isn't a healthy attitude when we are in a continuously evolving field with almost endless resources. If the world wants us to embrace Web 2.0, then we first need to embrace this "Librarian 2.0".

Tag! You're It!

I looked up the URL for PBCLS and I thought it was really interesting. There were a lot of mentions of the "Mousing Around" exercises on our website...which I personally enjoy. I thought it was cool on the "Book of the Month" blog for Sci-Fi books that our system/website got a mention along with the Kansas City Public Library. For Web 2.0, nothing really interesting or surprising popped up. I did enjoy looking under the "photo" portion to see different logos that people have made for Web 2.0.

Yummy

Del.icio.us is a great tool for research assistance. I like that it gives you everything with a certain tag-as opposed to some sites that just give you the top 5 tag hits. You don't even have to go into a particular site to find more info...it offers you other related tags right on the results page. The only complaint that I have...I wish it was a little nicer to look at. It is kind of drab and doesn't (imo) make me want to stay on "playing" for very long.