Friday, July 31, 2009

Thing 18 - Wikis

Wikipedia: enjoyed doing something I hadn't yet done: read "about..." stuff! and was glad to see things like "This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2009)" with a fairly timely date attached. Also enjoyed history; several are recently active, several not so much. I think that there could be a lot added, for example to the "history" section of paleomagnetism... I even know someone who could add it; will see if they are interested! Makes me wonder, though if some of the active scientists are taking an interest, or leaving this to those a bit removed. Interesting too to see that things like "wikiproject geology" exist. We steer families away from this to things like MedlinePlus for authoritative medical info...
I like the exercise of creating wiki pages! and the ability to add a link within the page! Thank you for that. The Hospital Library Section of the Medical Library Association has a wiki (http://mla-hls.wikispaces.com/) and I think I'll feel more comfortable really using it (rather than just knowing it is there) after this experience. Not that I feel I've much to offer re: contributions, but have much better understanding of how it's put together!
What fun!

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Thing 17 - LibWorm

I like the tag cloud! This cloud concept really appeals to me - one my favorite things to take away from the 23 things... Lots of technology related concepts/tags - 2.0 features, digital content, etc.(as one would expect). And copyright is still there! Look at how many ways one needs to look to find the open-access related feeds using tags.
Plenty of foreign language content (French, German, Dutch, Chinese).

The IM subject search returned a great piece on how to use Twitter in a library (feeding digital signage - a way to distribute vital information to studentson campus).
Enjoyed seeing the links for Pubget. Enjoyed seeing many of the new JMLA articles show up. Had a tough (actually unsucessful) time finding something on the best OPACS, or favorite OPACS. Actually, not very satisfying; had a tough time finding what I thought I was searching for on any topic, though interesting things did turn up in many searches. I will/would have to spend some time learning how to find what I really want before I would be able to latch onto a feed and really make use of this, as opposed, say, to watching my favorite list serv posts or searching a library-oriented database.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Thing 15 - Digg

Notice: items from all over the map - science to National Enquirer in your neighborhood. Ads along side. Fascinating to see how quickly things change: new items appear, number of diggs going up.
Interesting way to see/learn about things:
  • Loved learning about the Live Science image gallery; something I've never heard of before!
  • Enjoyed finding links to a zillion items associated with Dr. Gawande's New Yorker article about health care costs (McAllen, TX)... including an interview on the NPR Fresh Air radio show.
  • Surprised at how few items there were about Walter Kronkite, how few diggs they had. Did I just miss them?
  • Lots of technology stuff, expected; so good place to find this material, or a perspective on it. (Like this: twitter.com is such a poor user experience, and here are 9 alternative web clients to tweet from instead.)
  • By the same token, poor grammar in the posts is just as distracting here as elsewhere. Can you really trust news from some site that doesn't know how to use grammar?
International content, broad & deep, as intro video states. But who are the people that contribute/digg, and who is not doing so? What kind of bias is inherent because of the participation?

Nice to know about, perhaps good for helping us to find things people ask about & we don't know where to find. But not something I would depend upon for all my news, or for doing research. Interesting to hear the video intro discuss using it for just that.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Thing 14 - Delicious

Oh boy. I'm so used to using phrases for tags (rather than a single word) and wound up with three instead of one (2. 0 23 things becomes 2.0 and 23 and things). Had to clean this up.
But I understand the value of the tags, and the organization. Have used folders and quicklinks to organize bookmarks for a long time now, so rather than just learning about something new, using Delicious means changing an old habit - harder to do without a lot of motivation!

Ok - here is my delicious page link:
http://delicious.com/denahanson

I'm repeatedly finding that I don't always want to know what everyone else is thinking/feeling/tagging. Some trusted people would be good to share with, but I don't want to spend my time surfing around to see what just anyone has bookmarked / tagged.

Best advantage I see right now is the ability to see bookmarks from any computer... Like using Refworks to manage citations, because then I can find things at any computer in my organization - for example, when I'm teaching someone searching skills in their office instead of at my desk.
I'm looking forward to seeing if I can see these Delicious bookmarks at the office.

And I know a medical librarian I have a lot of respect for who has use Delicious to tag some useful websites; it will be useful to see what she has and how hers are organized. I'll have to find out her user name to see her stuff I think.

Thing 13 - Tagging

I know; I should have done this before Library Thing! The concept of 'non-hierarchical' organization is a bit foreign after years of MESH searching and of serving on the vocabulary task force for GeoRef - both of which are strongly based on hierarchy.

From an earlier post: Tags: these are so useful, so important. This has made me think a lot more deeply about classification, organization - back to my first cataloging job when I realized how important the perspective of the "findee" is.

Am becoming very enamored with the tag cloud concept. Visually appealing; a way to clarify relevance; and there is a hint of hierarchy(!).

Wonder if our OPAC allows user tagging? Will find out. It could certainly be used in addition to the subject headings (which I'm loathe to do away with, no harm in keeping) at least to see how the patrons are thinking about finding things. But our library collection is so small (few thousand books) that finding things isn't really a problem. Might be very useful in finding what medical libraries often call "consumer health" books for our families, because they rarely think in terms of MESH headings. Physicians, nurses, other care givers are usually at least exposed to it because of Medline searches.

I like the tagging concept, and I like the potential for patron involvement, for input from someone beside a cataloger that might make it easier for everyone to find things. But - since we all think so differently, it can't be the only answer. Even when my own Library Thing collection was only about 14 books, I already forgot how I tagged some things, and applied a different tag to things that I would later expect to find under the earlier tag... Consistency. Reproducible results. Guess that's why I'm so fond of controlled vocabulary after all these years. And why I teach it to our patrons - along with keywords, not instead of!

Thing 16 - Library Thing

This came up today because a knitting site I belong to lets us create a library of our knitting books, selecting from books already on file there. Well, there is supposedly an option to upload titles from LibraryThing if it a title isn't already in Ravelry, so I thought good time to do thing 16. Turns out that Ravelry's application is still in progress and I can't yet upload books -- but I'm into Library Thing! I like being able to not only list books I already have, but to keep track of those books I want to read & keep forgetting about (all those sticky notes? won't need them!).

Tags: these are so useful, so important , but I had to read about using them to be able to make them work effectively. This has made me think a lot more deeply about classification, organization - back to my first cataloging job when I realized how important the perspective of the "findee" is.

Realize that this is being used as an OPAC for some libraries - probably not suitable for ours, though. We're hoping to add actual PDFs as well as URLs and our catalog; strictly MESH for now, but likely to change; also to include kids' books. And again, most of our staff can't get out to sites like this. Still, interesting thought.

Mostly, though, I find myself really like this site for personal reasons, and know I could spend way more time here that is good for me! I instantly want to add/organize all the books in my house. And then move on to music; can't find any music on LibraryThing, but music is in libraries, and is available on Amazon & in LC, so perhaps it will come? Do you know of any sites that allow one to add/organize music like this does books?

Friday, July 24, 2009

Thing 12 - Twitter

I'm using my name (denahanson) as my twitter screen name. I like the fact that I can deactivate this account if I choose; thanks for tipping us not to just add our email/password automatically.

This is another one of the applications that I'm glad to know about, will try using, but don't expect to use much. I don't have much inclination to be constantly letting many people what I'm thinking or doing at any one particular time - and maybe don't really want to know what many others are doing continuously either. And twitter isn't something we have access to from the hospital. It was fun to see the way that the Medical Library at the Alfred I duPont Hospital for Children (Nemours Foundation) uses their twitter account (Mr. Tweet)! It's up to date, and gives one ideas (motitvation!) for professional uses. Not many followers, but I'm going to track it for a while. Fun.

Did check for knitting things to follow, and found a favorite catalog that is tweeting. The knitting-related tweets I found (topical search) were so numerous that one would rarely find something useful without following a person/org specifically.

Guess it could be useful if for responding to radio shows (if you do that) - surely that is where I've heard about it the most, outside of the NT 23 things. In fact, the last place I heard about Twitter before doing this Thing was on NPR's Diane Rhehm Show this morning and on KERA's "anything you want to know" program at noon today.

Thing 19 - Google Docs

Google Docs has so many possibilities! A colleague from CT and I have already used it to share information about a group we're working with to knit afghans to give to children at the next Medical Library Association Meeting. But I didn't really look at all the options. Love the forms / survey possibilities.
This will be a great way to share committee work; when preparing agendas, revising procedure manuals or bylaws or presentations - how easy to share and make changes. And the Pediatric Libraries group compiles & updates a list of core pediatric titles (books & journals) every year - how much easier to place this into a spreadsheet on Google Docs and let us each make our section's changes, & keep up with what others are doing too. Wow! Then just turn it into a PDF and Voila!

Not as much use within my own organization because we already use sharepoint and some other tools to share, and because so much of what we do much be kept inside the firewall... But inter-organization sharing, nice..

And of course, nice for personal stuff, too, because it is so platform-independent. Doesn't matter if the rest of my family is in California and doesn't use a Mac, or if my dad has much older WORD software than I do... We can still collaborate easily (who wants to come to the football party, and what are you bringing, and what time should we eat and how many tickets do you need?). Could even share address labels (some neat templates available).
Wow again. I'm looking forward to making use of this!

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Thing 11 - Instant Messaging

I loved this tool so much when I first heard Jeff Bond talk about it at the Library Tech meeting in Fort Worth. And today I had two email interactions with other librarians that would have worked as IM interactions very well - we were both at the computer and responding back and forth via email bam bam bam... But, they don't IM, and I'm not sure yet how to get them started - or even sure I can do it at work.
But - I have now signed up for a web-based account on Yahoo (since that is where my email is) and also for Meebo as an agregator (just confirmed with them that I am not a robot).
I love all the text messaging abbreviations! thanks for the link.
I rather like the idea of using IM as a reference tool - but given the vargaries of our library, we don't really have a "reference desk" so there isn't really a time when any one of the 2.5 of us are dedicated to time/place where IM reference could really work. I am going to ask if I can become part of the Outlook IM-type application that our Information Serivices people use between themselves to help answer problems/questions. An educator colleague also uses it, and between watching her use it, and listening to Jeff, I think I have a better feeling for how it works than I got from the Meebo video clip. The Outlook option might at least give me a chance to use the feature in my professional environment & see if I can answer someone's question, get their input on a searchk, or walk them through finding an article online, for example...
Now, the hardest part seems to be just finding someone to converse with at a time when we are both available to do so, so I can try this for the 23 things! And then there is all this stuff about having an avitar (couldn't figure that one out this morning, but maybe if I try again another time?) and other customizations... Jeepers. More on this.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Thing 10 - NING

My thoughts after reading the ChartingStocks blog: Thanks for not making us create an account on NING. This brought home how much we trust our colleagues for recommendations and leads on websites and applications like this - and how vulnerable our privacy or that of our associates is. At NING I found a knitting community that I recognized - KnitPicks - from a catalog that I receive; a good one. Many of the others looked like 2-3 people conversing with each other. And there are communities from all over the world (knitting in Swedish, communities in Setswana from Botswana).
ALA's community is pretty good sized... But there are a lot of small ones too. I don't think I'm going to establish an account, but the tutorial video really gives a good sense of the variety of options and opportunitites (read: complexity) NING offers. Lots of choices, lots of "faces" to show the different sides of you that you choose to share. My sense is (from such a short exposure!) that unlike Facebook for example, this isn't something most everyone takes part in... But there are lots of interesting options. Appreciate the comment by one 23 things blogger about using it for their community and not getting any resulting spam - a real + today!
In the back of my mind I can't help recognizing that by now I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed, and like most things in life, I will have to ration myself. I simply don't have time (or desire) to spend all my time online participating in these networks and communication options, so will have to choose... and knowing myself, I might use something more if there is a professional reason to. NING doesn't look like it will be a part of our library / hospital world anytime soon (searching hospitals returned many hospitality connections!), and I already have ways of keeping in touch with both colleagues individually and with the professional societies I usually track...
So, nice to know about this one, but probably won't keep up with it for now.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Image Generators (Thing 5)


This image is about the night and day we spent outside Morongoro in Tanzania, with a lovely view of the Uluguru Mountains. We were at this '50s-era hotel a night and a day while local mechanics replaced the land cruiser head gasket and flushed the radiator. So, while the view helped rebuilt our inner engines, the guys were really rebuilding the one we needed for field work.
What fun to create images. I tried making something in the Woordle generator using text from a Medical Library Association poster (Ask an expert. Ask your Librarian) - but found it didn't like two "ask" and while I wanted LIBRARIAN to be the focus, Wordle kept making ASK the focus... probably because there were two. Yes, when I removed one "ask" and added a second "Librarian" then librarian became the focus! Don't know how to include it here, though.
These tools would be a great way to make a poster for a special event perhaps, or for a "library is closed this afternoon" day, or holidays... Something outside of our usual clip art!
Clever.
Here's another choice: finding the right word (From Susie) - a visual thesaurus.

Thing 7 - RSS Feeds

Have watched the RSS video, and added a number of RSS feeds to my Google reader. So far, in addition to watching the 23 things blog, I'm also able to track the American Academy 0f Pediatrics ethics and children's health feeds, NPR's children's health topics, latest news from the CDC, and the Brenneman blog, from the Memorial Children's Hospital library in Chicago.
Now that I can see these, I am re-reading an article from the SLA journal that discussed putting RSS feeds into library webpages. My problem here is that (1) I need to convince the IT people that it would be a good idea to let this show up on our library's intranet page, and (2) figure out how to make the formatting acceptable. It is one thing for me to track things myself using my Google reader; but another whole concept to make something useful and appealing (not too much space, nice to look at, just enough info. to catch the interest) appear for my physicians and nurses - to be of help, but not blocky and awkward...
And even then, I can see I'd probably want to edit the feed, because not anything from any of these places would really be of interest to everyone...
Best will be to just share the concept of keeping up with whatever is of interest with each of the staff as we have the chance - let them choose their own, and perhaps help them find the feeds!
dfh

Friday, July 17, 2009

Flickr Mashups


I'm finding out that even though I think I'm pretty comfortable using computers, these applications are not intuitive to me! (Rats!) It's not always easy to figure out how to make them work, and I'm sure that's partly because I'm not always sure what I want to be able to do. However I was able to add a caption to a favorite photo from our 2008 Africa field season; when the land cruiser started leaking something part way through Tanzania, we drove it onto a ramp at the Toyota shop so the guys could look underneath - and they discovered something unexpected; there was only one bolt holding the body onto the chassis... Jeepers.
I like the colr pickr; great to reflect a daily mood in image by color, or find something to inspire a yarn color mix for socks & sweaters. And flappr lets one pull up all kinds of things (knitted items?!). And they are from all over the world! So, I can find images of journals, for example, to illustrate something on our library webpage - but, aren't they protected by copyright? We can't just use any of these... or can we? I obviously didn't read something in the "agree" part that I should have.
Using the "sketch" option in retrievr, I tried to draw knitting stitches; surprisingly I found a great many images of eyelashes!
Much of these would help in finding images patrons have asked about, especially medically-related things (which we normally use Google Images or some such to find).
I did go back and through the "EXPLORE" option in Flickr, looked at the world map, and found images uploaded by geography; and even added a few of ours to Tanzania, but only for us to see for now. Like being able to see photos of places around the world!

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Flickr

Although I'd created a Flickr account a few years ago to share some wildflower photos with my dad, I'd forgotten this, so was starting from scratch. I tried to look at photos from libraries; public libraries were easiest. At the Lunar & Planetary Institute I really didn't find an, but enjoyed one from the UNT Health Science Center San Antonio (my friend receiving an award - something I'd seen in our newsletter).
This seems really fun for personnal sharing (it is so tough to send many photos via email, and the different email hosts and going from mac to pc complicates the matter.
For the library, it might be fun to show our first library, our new / remodled version, upcoming changes, and our existing (small) space. Including photos of our research day posters would be fun as well. Always have to get permission, or check - institutions are more protective the public libraries and university departments!
Then I decided to upload the few photos I had from our geological field trip to Tanzania last summer (didn't get far that year - vehicle breakdown!!). Was able to tag & label, too. Here they are:
http://flickr.com/gp/14285729@N03/9L3x53

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

More Facebook (Thing 9)

I find I'm not so comfortable posting general things to share, or basic what I believe statements. It is enough to have a Facebook presence for now. Wow; I now have 20 friends. And have joined 3 groups (Medical Library Association, Geoscience Information Society, and the Ravelry Knitters group). And have become fans of Cook Children's Medical Center, and of my dentist's office (Barry Stovall).

Mostly have been tracked down (or tracked down) family and colleagues. The few really old friends that I keep in contact with don't seem to participate in Facebook and other 2.0 activities - but wow, the librarians I know sure do! My brother actually joined when I let him know his son had accepted me as a friend - just so he could see how his son uses it. Now he has friends and contacts of his own!

So I am waiting to see if I find out how my Facebook contact differ from my email contacts. Facebook is much more like having a "caring bridge" page that I see our hospital families using for sharing when someone is ill - you can make a statement or share a happening with a bunch of people all interested in the same thing all at once. And people can track you down on Facebook. Email is more personal, each message tailored to the one it goes to, and it is more private - except for SPAM, only those you share your address with generally know where to find you.

Again, I'll be more comfortable with a profession presence than personal; just can't see that many people interested in me or what I'm doing all that often!

Thing 8 - Facebook

After setting up my facebook account I was surprised at how quickly my family (well, especially my nieces and nephew) wanted or agreed to be friends... and then my brother and cousin. Wow. But the motivating force was really my medical library colleagues, who befriended me first and most. It became a way to follow activities at the annual meeting in Hawaii that I couldn't attend, and to learn things about the people, not just the librarians.
I am an introvert, and the transparency and visibility of this venue doesn't sit well. I like to hear from friends, family; but am not so sure about showing such a personal presence to the world at large.
Now, professional, that is quite a different matter. I'm looking forward to seeing what Facebook Pages are about... envisioning a library Facebook page has a whole different feel to it. Wonder how it would go down with the institution?

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Thing 2

Have watched videos and read about Web 2.0. Realize that I must do these all from home because many 2.0 activities are blocked from where I work. Interesting - and I'm guessing that if I worked for a Library as main function, that wouldn't be the case, but because I work for a library within another organization, the security / structure factors are more important than providing what I am learning 2.0 provides. The things that stick with me are:
experiencial learning, reflection, and thinking about 2.0 from the perspective of unintended consequences...
interactive / collaborative / needs of the community being served (being RELEVANT)
importance of data / form & content - and rethinking a great number of things.

Sounds like open minds, creativity, curiosity. Things libraries have fed for years!

Also sounds like we'll have time in our library to watch things move, and figure out how to apply them before we'll have the chance to actually do so... But even little things, like RSS, can be slipped in and work well!
Looking forward to the next (and rest) of this experience. And yes, it is so much better to actually use these tools, than just to read about them...
dfh