Twitter

WEll I added my note on Saturday and am finally bloggin about it today. I also started opened my own account. I have enjoyed and seen much of the use of the other applications throughout this 2pt0 thing but I think twitter is the one thing I don't find all that useful at least for my department. I acknowledge that you can see what everyone in the library is doing but at the same time that may be a glut of information. I just checked and pretty much everyone is attempting to finish their Krl2pt0 assignments before Thursday. I think for young peoples and teens this would be great for the teen librarian to chat with the students throughout the day. It would be good for outreach into that age group since most of them can sit for hours and chat. Also for people on the desk or reference librarians it would allow them to quickly connect with the other branches. For instance if one branch has an unruly patron who they had to ask to leave they could send a twitter out with a description to warn the other branches. Just a thought.

I see the group contact benefits for twitter but personally I still prefer instant messaging. You could write more and I have seen it successfully used in an office environment. Instead of having to interupt someone on the phone or in a meeting you can send them a quick IM. It's a multi-taskers dream. Honestly twitter just felt too overwhelming. It was kinda like a chat room that only people are allowed into. That is more how I would describe it. I probably won't really use this application much myself but it was great to learn about it.

Site for Students

Well, I found this lesson quite enlightening. It left me wishing I had known about these sites or that they had existed when I was getting my undergrad. The great thing is they have been brought to my attention just in time for my graduate degree. I think I will definitely be utilizing textbook fetch and the easy bibliographer generator. The more I learn about facebook the more exciting it becomes. I checked both the textbook fetch and cheapest textbook items. I had more luck with the textbook fetch and thnk I will find it more helpful. I could see the use of cheapest textbooks if you knew the people in your major. It is sort of a textbook sharing page.

I would like to bring your attention to my favorite application in facebook. It is a lot like library thing but I think better because you can share with your friends on facebook and they don't have to sign up for library thing. The application is called visual bookshelf. I recommend it so check it out if you have a facebook page. I will add a post to the library page too on facebook.

Facebook and Myspace

Well having been on myspace for two years now, I love these social networking sites. I realize you need to be careful with the information you give out. I have to say though that there is no better site for keeping up with friends and their lives. You can post pictures, write blogs and I love the crazy little things that facebook allows you to do. I have had a facebook account for about 6 months now. Between myspace and facebook I have reconnected with most of my college friends and some of my high school friends. Best of my extended famly has started to use so it is great to see updated photos of all my family in Chicago. Once you set up your page it really doesn't take much time to send a note to someone or upload a photo here and there. There is one word of caution you can waste hours upon hours of time looking for and tracking people's sites. So that is my rave review for private use of social networking sites.

Now for libraries. I really agreed with what Meredith Farkas had to say. I don't think being "cool" should be a library's focus on myspace or facebook. I think it should be a resource. Being a firmly in the age range of most of facebook's users I wouldn't visit a library's page just cause it was cool. Instead i really liked the idea of the library that had a search for its catalog. It's almost like connecting your email to the catalog. Let me explain that. I often use these sites as a type of email by sending my friends comments or messages. So i could send a friend a note and then click on my "friend" the Kitsap Regional Library and look up that subject for a research project or look and see if they have the newest Janet Evanovich title. I also think facebook is a great way to display the calendar of events. You could even have an rsvp option which would give you a preliminary count of how many people are planning to come to the site.

WHat can I say I really enjoy these sites.

Wiki 2

My department (collection management) actaully got together and created a wiki. Thanks in the most part to Constance o'SHea. It is actually up on the staff page now which is very exciting. I am about to write my first book recommendation. It is so great that we can share what we are reading with the rest of the staff in a user friendly format. We had a meeting to discuss what we mainly wanted on the site and how we wanted it formatted. It is great that the other members of the department can contribute to the recommendations and not just the selectors in our department. We have such of variety of interests just in our group. We chose to only have our department contribute to it at the moment with Constance running the master programmer. She is doing a great job by the way.

I mentioned this in my last blog but I think that each department and branch should have a wiki on the staff page that they can update and manipulate as they see fit. It would lessen the load on IT while allowing the rest of us up to the minute information. This would be especially useful for staff listing and who gets what in a department. I know just within our department that the branchs and other service department have a hard time knowing who to contact in our department and where to send things. We have a lot of forms so having updated forms and procedures on the wiki would make things more efficient I think. That is just for intra-library stuff.

I think a wiki for the public might be easier to use than some of the things on the website. Maybe a FAQ type of wiki that only staff could add to would be great. Also upcoming events at the branches. Each branch could maintain a wiki with it services and events listed. Of course I may be getting ahead of myself. That assumes that they would even have the staff and time to do so regularly. Ideally it would be great if they did.

Those are my thoughts on wikis.

Wikis Week One

I really enjoyed the fake branch. Wouldn't a branch on a boat be really fun? I think it would draw people in just because it would be so unique. The fake branch was quite entertaining to read and I couldn't imagine living on the abandoned hold shelves behind the desk. Speaking of holds shelves the ones behind the circ desk here at sylvan are looking a little lonely. Anywho, back to the point of this blog, wikis. The tutorial was very helpful in understanding wikis. Also the sandbox and fake branch were nice to be able to actually change the wiki. I much prefer the point and click mode to the classic mode. All that special language makes me want to run from it html and other programming. The point and click method definitely makes the wiki more user friendly. There was so much that you can do to change the wiki that I felt a little overwhelmed with the possibilities. But the great thing about wikis is that you don't have to do it alone.

I think for my department (collection management) there are a great number of ways that wikis will be useful for us. We already have a readers advisory blog which I am very excited to be a part of and be able to contribute to. Hopefully we will be able put together a wiki that lists some of the behind the scenes task we do. It would be great to have a list for staff of who to contact in regards to their requests as well as forms and other things they need access to.

Those are my thoughts this gray Monday afternoon.

YouTube

Library Thing

I just set up a small catalog on library thing. I haven't used it much but I think it is a great way to keep track of the books I have read and also share them with others. For those working the front line, I can see this being a great tool for keeping a list of suggestions for patrons depending on their interests. So far I have just added titles that I have recently read and enjoyed. This is a great tool for book groups as well. Those in the book group cold create catalogs to share with the other members of the book group while also tracking what books they have read as a group.

I confess I am still getting used to the formatting of the website and trying to understand how to use all it's functions but the basics are easy to understand and implement. It is nice to see that you can join discussions about the books you have posted and catalogued. That is a great way to gain more insight and understanding of the book. It's a virtual book group basically. This may sound funny but I really appreciate that they post a picture of the cover with the catalog. It may just be an aesthetic choice but I am a visual person so being able to see the cover helps me remember it better than just seeing the title and author.

The downfalls the website would be that it is time consuming to create an extensive catalog, but I think for now I will just stick to adding titles I have read recently and see how that works for me.