Our youngest library customers love to watch the goldfish and Jack Sparrow in the fishtank. Thanks to our Friends group we have this whimsical scene of adventurous pirates and sea creatures. I was on an adventure using Flickr for Thing #4 today. It's an amazing tool, and can contribute to a lot of distractions and wasted hours. Oh well, that's okay since this is all about learning, right?
I enjoyed the Common Craft video. I think their presentation style is very clever and I like the irony of it--very simple with paper cutouts and markers to present a high-tech concept!
I don't plan on storing many photos of my own on Flickr mainly because I don't take many photographs. I never have and I don't like carrying a camera around. But I do have friends who use Flicker so I'm glad that I've explored it and that I know how to search for their photos. And I guess I could use it to store photos that friends and family send to me. Yeah, that's what I'll do. It really is pretty easy to create an account and to upload photos, and for sorting and storing photos it seems great. I do cringe at the fact that all these photos are so public though. I still get nervous even though there is the privacy setting. Are there really any guarantees of privacy for anything that's posted on the web? I don't know.
I've been using Bloglines for several months now but I've discovered that I've subscribed to too many feeds. I check Bloglines every few days, usually if I have a few minutes at the end of my work day and don't have time to start something new. I read many library-related blogs but I've grown tired of some of them--many of them are just self-promotions (which is true of many blogs, I think) so I go through the list and "trash" those every couple of months. I end up asking myself "Do I really care what this person thinks or what conference they've just attended?" But it is good practice to try some blogs for awhile then switch around if you want something new. Some library blogs that I do like are LISNews, The Annoyed Librarian, Information Wants to Be Free, Library Stuff, and Library Crunch. And of course the cartoons, Shelf Check and Unshelved. For readers advisory and keeping up with new authors, I like The Reader's Advisor Online Blog, The Book Babes, and Critical Mass from the National Book Critics Circle.
I prefer to keep up with the daily news by reading the newspaper every single day. I can't skip the paper or the daily comics. It's much more relaxing for me to sit down with the paper than to sit at the computer for my daily news fix. I've always believed that reading news from a daily paper helps me do my job better. Reading blogs doesn't help me in the same way that a newspaper does when a customer mentions they saw something in the paper and want to know more about it or they want help finding an article. For me, there's just something about a printed newspaper. Yes, my age is showing! There are a couple of Minnesota-related news blogs that I do check regularly: MinnPost and Minnesota Monitor. Many of the writers at MinnPost are former StarTribune columnists. I missed them when they left the paper, so it's great to still be able to read them online.
I don't really understand how the RSS feeds work yet, or how they're different from blog readers. More investigating of that later. I need to pick up a book before it's too late tonight!
If part of Library 2.0 is "meeting library customers in their space, as opposed to ours," I'm trying to embrace that idea today while monitoring an online reference service. So far during my two-hour shift, I've had one customer. She asked the question, I chatted about how to search the catalog, then she left the conversation! I think it's important to provide chat reference as an option for people, but I don't think it can ever be as helpful or as satisfying as actually speaking in person or on the telephone with a customer. I feel quite isolated right now because the customer just "hung-up." I don't know if she found what she was looking for, or if she got tired of waiting a few seconds for my response. In the case of online reference, I think it's important for libraries to remember that we have many more things to offer that Library 2.0 does not have. If I was talking directly with this customer, I could've used my reference interviewing skills, showed her how to use the catalog, and made sure she found what she was looking for. For all I know she hung up thinking that the library isn't helpful at all! I know I can't do anything about customers who just abruptly leave a chat session, but it does make me feel defeated. Did this really make me a better librarian because I know how to use the chat line?
I think the suggested reading for Thing #2 was interesting especially Blyberg's blog. I'm glad he linked to other professional opinions that don't necessarily agree with his own. I certainly spent more than 15 minutes linking to all the other blogs in his blog to read different view points. I'm glad I had some time away from the "real" information desk to work on this lesson. I'm having trouble agreeing when he says L2 is bringing a revolutionary change to libraries. I think my experience today working with online customers is proof that technology isn't always better just because it's available and our library knows how to work it. I remain skeptical of some aspects of Library 2.0, but some things I like very much, such as allowing our customers to make comments in the library catalog and to create book lists to share with other readers. That part of being connected is fun!
I finally finished creating an avatar--whew! Again, I I had to consult two colleagues to figure out the busy avatar pages. It was sort of fun looking at all the choices, but where are the average, everyday size 12 women? Oh, that's right--this is the virtual world. I'm still trying to figure out how this will apply to or improve my real life. I started becoming impatient having to click through all the avatar choices. Thank goodness for the handy instructions from the 23 Things on A Stick folks on how to export the image. Now on to registering this blog.
I got started on this 23 Things program while monitoring an online reference service. I was thinking that being out there in the virtual reference world would somehow make me less apprehensive about creating a blog and an avatar. Yes, I'm supposed to be feeling brave today. It took me nearly two hours to complete my profile, but I helped a couple of customers in between creating a Yahoo account, deciding what my avatar should look like, and figuring out how to register this blog. I was a little panic-stricken when I had so many windows open at one time and felt like I was losing my way around my desktop. Getting started with this has been quite a challenge--good thing that's what I like on the job!
Our youngest library customers love to watch the goldfish and Jack Sparrow in the fishtank. Thanks to our Friends group we have this whimsical scene of adventurous pirates and sea creatures. I was on an adventure using Flickr for Thing #4 today. It's an amazing tool, and can contribute to a lot of distractions and wasted hours. Oh well, that's okay since this is all about learning, right?