Playing Around with Wikis (#17)

I love this! If I didn't have two young kids, I'd probably spend all my free time updating wikis. I added some Kevin Ayers song lyrics to LyricWiki. I had to search for a slightly more obscure musician, because all the usual suspects' lyrics were completely up to date. The Kevin Ayers lyrics haven't yet been broken down by album and though I'm still confused about how to do it, I'll probably go back on and try to categorize all the songs by album and download the artwork for them. This could be something I could get entirely too obsessed with, appealing as it does to all my tastes - pop culture, lists, research, and an encyclopedia that I contributed to as the end result.

Wikis (#16)

I love, love, love the idea of wikis. I'm completely sure I am not the first person to notice this, but the ultimate wiki is the real life hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. From anywhere, you can use your handheld device to look something (anything) up. That's so cool! As a librarian, I can't think of anything cooler. The reality is though, that people have to actually work on the wikis constantly, because if they aren't up to date, they're nothing, right? The library wikis we were asked to look at were a mixed bag. The best one was the Princeton Public Library's Book Lovers Wiki. I wished I lived in Princeton so I could participate. I'm a sucker for anything that contains reviews. I found a link from the Library Success wiki to a search engine for librarian written book reviews. Genius! Except when I tried to use it I couldn't get any relevant results. Too bad. I thought the SJCPL Subject Guide was merely so so, because the specific subject guides weren't really all that informative and many of them hadn't been updated in quite some time. At least they didn't seem to be wrong or offensive. For about three weeks last year, the Wikipedia entry on Uzbekistan contained someone's idea of a joke and I kept meaning to find the time to change it, but didn't. That to me sums up the problems inherent in wikis. But, it's always great to find information on the most obscure of topics which is what a wiki guarantees. There will be a person out there who is an expert on the strangest thing you can think of!

Library 2.0 (#15)

Reading all the example articles from the Queens Library Learning blog has definitely helped me better understand the concept of Library 2.0. I've been hearing the catchphrase bandied about for so long, but it didn't mean much to me beyond thinking I had to learn how to use myspace or something - ha ha. Now that I've read the articles, I not only have a better understanding, but I also feel, dare I say it, kind of excited about the whole idea. I found Library Journal's article "Library 2.0: Service for the next-generation Library" the most clear-cut, jargon free, and impartial of the lot. The author defines Library 2.0 as any service that reaches users, is evaluated frequently, and makes use of customer input. This means Library 2.0 doesn't have to be technology related if it's an especially good idea, but technology is a great facilitator. I like the idea of having an OPAC that customers can input to, and I think pointing customers to on-line applications that do what in-house apps used to do (i.e. Wrightley for word processing instead of MS Word - fight the power!) is a fantastic idea. However, I'm wary of the all beta all the time part of Library 2.0 where we implement new programs/ideas as fast as possible in a potentially imperfect state and then fix them as we go. It seems to me that that is already the modus operandi of the public library and it often bites us in the rear. I realize we sometimes spend far too long in the "planning" phase without moving quickly to "doing,"but in reality things that aren't fairly thoroughly planned out have a way of becoming a morass that is never really fixed. Also, I worry about the phrase "the just in case collection," as in, we really need to get rid of the "just in case collection." Until the majority of books are accessible digitally/on line, we still need repositories of possibly obscure and arcane books, because I think those books are still a part of the collective knowledge/information that libraries should preserve. The public library may not be the place for them, but in the OCLC article I read, the person advocating getting rid of these kinds of things was an academic librarian. I sometimes feel afraid that the democratization of our culture via the web, blogging, etc can also be a kind of dumbing down of it, or a reducing of it to the lowest common denominator. Just because it's not for everyone doesn't mean it shouldn't be preserved. And, I wish my library had some cool blogs about what to read or what's going on in the community, but I'm not sure anyone would read them except librarians. There is also always so much going on on the OPAC that it's hard to find stuff like this on there. But, I guess it is true that if we all start thinking in 2.0 mindset, we'll be ready for it before the customers. And the customers wil eventually want these things I am sure.

Technorati (#14)

I thought I was getting the hang of this web 2.0 thing, but Technorati has made me feel like an old fogey again. Maybe I'm not really down with "the blogosphere", because I had a hard time finding much of interest in the blogs listed in the Popular area. Many of the ones listed were highly technical, as if most of the bloggers out there are tech heads which they probably are, or at least compared to me. And, I already knew about many of the others like Boing Boing, TMZ, etc. I also found the constantly updating screen annoying. I know it makes the results more up to the minute, but give me a minute to focus on something before it changes please. I did find some stuff on Library 2.0. The directory search yielded the most relevant results. The tags and posts search gave me pretty much the same list of semi-relevant posts. The directory search found me blogs that directly addressed Learning 2.0 where the other two searches gave me any post that mentioned learning 2.0 in passing. If you're really into blogs, I could see using this, but I don't see myself doing so, until the blogosphere gets more varied.

Tagging (#13)

This week's assignment was to check out the Queens Library Web 2.0 del.icio.us page and/or create your own account. I did both. I am really digging the fact that I can store all my bookmarks in one place on my new account since we have 9 computers we can use at work and I have one at home too. I don't have a blackberry yet (thank god) but I imagine it would help there too. I found the link to the Library Journal article about del.icio.us tagging for libraries on the QL page. I'd tried to read it before but now that I've explored the site, I understand it much better. It seems like another good way to introduce the kids to libraries so I see nothing wrong with it. However, my fusty old librarian side is somewhat disturbed by the lack of authority control in all this willy nilly tagging. White it's nice to escape from the imposed "library language" of subject headings, I also feel like what if everyone has a different way of describing certain concepts or things? Could it make things MORE complicated in the end rather than less so? It's certainly a fun process though.

Eat in NYC! (#12)

I had a good time with this one and I hope my rollyo search is useful. I was torn between doing one for book or movie reviews and one for food. In the end I choose New York city eating, something I love to do, but can't do as much since the kids. Therefore, every time I have the opportunity to go out to eat, I do a lot of prep ahead of time - checking reviews, neighborhoods, making reservations, etc. - so I knew about more websites that would be relevant to this topic. It was very easy to create a Rollyo search and when I tested mine, I seemed to get relevant results. I would still be very interested in a rollyo search for book and/or movie reviews, so maybe one of my fellow Queens 2.0 travelers can make one.

Eat in NYC

Library thing (#11)

I really like the concept of library thing because I love to collect and to catalog. I also love to read - strange for a librarian, huh? I like the idea of creating my own folksonomy with my tags. The only criticism I have is that I actually signed up on Library Thing a few months ago and couldn't remember my username and password. Since the sign up process is so simple and doesn't require you to enter anything at all, there is no way to retrieve my account. I hadn't done too much on it, but still. It should be a bit more complicated to get onto it so they can help you if you lose track of yourselrf among the many usernames and passwords the Web 2.0 Society requires. Also, when I stopped using Library Thing, I began a goodreads account and now I am a bit too lazy to duplicate all that information on another site. Like so many of these 2.0 tools, Library Thing seems too ephemeral to me. I am going to create a "What I am Reading Now" widget for this blog and let's hope I can stay on top of it.