Discovery Exercise #14

A tip of the hat to Ed for his helpful tips on this blog post.  At first, I had trouble searching by tag, etc., but Ed straightened me out.

Unfortunately, knowing how to perform the searches correctly did not make me like the site any better.

As others have noted, Technorati seems a bit overwhelming to me.  I guess my recent Google-ization and an inherent minimalist streak (what other kinds of streaking could there be?) cause me to prefer clean and orderly looking websites.

Now, having learned something from Ed, I am now going to take a tip from another colleague and check out cooks.com to see if I can find any recipes worth making.  I'm on my late shift and getting ready to have lunch in 20 minutes.  

Boy, I'm hungry.

Discovery Exercise #15

Rick Anderson's "Away From the 'Icebergs'" was an interesting read for me. I thought that he hit on some relevant issues that libraries will be facing in the future; in fact, we are already feeling the impact of technological change.

First, he says we must do away with a "just in case" collection. To me, this means having a core set of print and electronic databases as a foundation, and then supplement with more resources and materials as budgets and customer usage direct. Having attended Gale's webinar "Is Print Reference Dead?", this is an interesting topic to me. I don't think that we need to get rid of print materials entirely, even if more and more people are embracing the web. Obviously, many of our customers have not, and still prefer tangible items. However, with each generation of tech-savvy kids that comes along, that day is approaching.

Anderson makes an interesting point about user education: sometimes it's more important to decrease the barriers that customers face getting information instead of focusing solely on instruction. I do believe that we should make things as accessible as possible, but I'm not sure that we can totally do away with customer education. Again, it all depends on your customer base and level of comfort with technology. Still, his point that we should focus on "user-centric" service is well taken.

Finally, he suggests that we must be ready to meet the customer where they are, not necessarily expect them to come to the physical library. I think that JPL is already doing this. Many library blogs are appearing to reach out to customers, library accounts can be accessed anywhere online, materials such as Overdrive are being offered to our customers -- we are on the right path.

Discovery Exercise #13

First, I must say that I don't really bookmark pages that often. I guess I have bookmarked a few things in the past, but it may be because the traditional way is so cluttered and unorganized I just quit using them altogether. I tend to want to keep articles that I have found on the Net for future reference -- since urls disappear constantly, particularly if it's a news story. I've been using Furl for that purpose. It's similar to Delicious in the fact that you can categorize and tag things you have saved, and then make them public so that others can find articles that you have saved.

Having said all that, I think that Delicious could be something I might use. I can definitely recommend it to my wife. As a middle school science teacher, she is constantly bookmarking webpages that she finds that have helpful information (similar to the hypothetical math teacher in the Common Craft video). Currently, she has a enormous list of bookmarks in no particular order, and I'm sure Delicious could make it easier to find the sites she needs. Plus, the bookmarks are "portable" since they are accessed from a website instead of one particular computer.

I was thinking that a departmental or branch account could be useful, as staff could add sites that are used often with their own tags. This could then be used to complement existing Recommended Websites links when helping customers. Unlike the official JPL link pages, any staff could add pages and tags to the group account for use.

Discovery Exercise #12

I think that having a JAXCAT Search function on a blog or webpage can be helpful in certain conditions.

For example, on my own iGoogle page I have a JAXCAT gadget, and I use it as a shortcut to search for library materials.  

Also, if your blog or site is frequented by mostly local or regional users, it could be a helpful tool to draw new users into the library.  Even if they didn't initially click on the gadget to perform a search, they might simply recall the seeing the logo and search field and decide to visit the library the next time they need a resource.

Either way, it can't hurt to try:  it's no more than a short html script that been copied and pasted to a gadget.  It might bring in new users, and at worst, you've only wasted approximately 30 seconds of your time (though the person who wrote the script might have taken longer).

Discovery Exercise #11

OK, I've added a few books to Library Thing, but I don't think that I will use it in the future.  I'm sure it's a good program, but I already use Shelfari, and more recently Google Books to catalog my holdings.  Plus, I don't own or read enough books to justify three online libraries (hopefully my MLS will not be revoked).  Having said all of the above, as an organizing freak, it is nice to have programs that allow you to catalog your home collection.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=gregs23&shelf=shelf

Also, I added the Library Thing widget to my blog's sidebar.

Discovery Exercise #10

The Scream generator.

http://www.churchsigngenerator.com/

Discovery Exercise #9

I tried these, and while I found them to be OK, I don't think I'll be using them all that much.

I couldn't get Feedster to load.

When I went to Topix, I was totally turned off by the layout. It was way too cluttered for a neat-freak like myself. For example, I tried browsing the "sports" tab, but it was just a jumbled bunch of gobblety-gook. There are a couple of sites that I would go to for that news anyway (SI, ESPN) so I don't think it would be that useful to me.

I liked Syndic8.com's site better as far as being simpler. It wasn't the most aesthetically pleasing, but still less garbled than Topix. I preferred the simple list of feeds that resulted from my search. If there were anything that I wanted to subscribe too, it would have been easy to add them to a reader.

Technorati looked like a nice enough site -- ordered without being sterile -- but I still prefer using Google Reader. It's an excellent reader, with a good, clear layout, and has it's own feed/blog search built in. For the few things that I have time to read about, it's really all I need. If I'm looking for some different news sites, I usually just find interesting links from sites like CNN, etc.

Fun with RSS Feed Readers (Discovery Ex. #8)

I love the simplicity and convenience of RSS and newsreaders.

There are several news & commentary sites and a few blogs that I follow on a regular basis, so life became much simpler when I discovered what a newsreader was.

I've been using Google Reader for a few months now, and it's great. From what I can tell so far, Bloglines is very similar, but I like the fact that I only need one account to manage my various Google sites (Gmail, Reader, iGoogle, Blogger, etc.). Using a newsreader is basically like having the news and information sites that you surf to each day delivered to email, organizing everything into one neat place.

Reading items is much more efficient this way, and you can even mark interesting items so that they can be archived and retrieved at a later date.

One way that libraries can use RSS technology is to integrate areas of the homepage with graphical displays, such as a box highlighting newly arrived materials (with hyperlinks to the catalog record so customers can check it out or place holds). I was also going to say that it would be great to have news feeds on the library's Current Events & News Page (Recommended Websites), but I see that they are already there. Bravo! An RSS feed of the library's Program Calendar would also be great if available, as customers could subscribe to this to keep up to date with events at their branch. Actually, that's available also. Hmm, I guess we're off to a good start using RSS feeds.

My public bloglines URL is http://www.bloglines.com/public/gregs23