Web 2.0 is an open and programmable web. It's leading towards a change in lifestyle where all mobile and non-mobile electronic devices are connected to the web at all times.
Iceberg Article by Rick Anderson: He warns about "icebergs" to library service and the library profession. 1. "Just in Case" Collection. His thoughts on eliminating costly book collections for more up to date materials is a relevant concern for all reference and non-fiction items. Which way do we spend the money? Of course, the Univ of Reno library where he works has seen a huge decrease 55 % in circulation. I'm not sure that's true of most public libraries overall circulation. 2. Reliance on user education. He believes that technology needs to change and be more user-friendly instead of having more training for users. While, this would be great, we still have to meet our users where they are and provide them access to the information they need. 3. "Come to us" model of library service refers to having to come to a physical location rather than meeting users online. While I understand his point and agree that we need to prepare for the technosavy among us, I still think there's a lot to be said for physical structures and face-to-face social interaction no matter how high-tech the overall population becomes.
Into a New World of Librarianship by Michael Stephens: I would like to just copy all of his fine points and goals and philosophies into my blog (and my memory) but instead here is a link http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/002/3.htm
To better bibliographic services by John Jay Reimer: I hadn't looked at World Cat as Web 2.0 before, but since the idea of file sharing and open access is the basis of Web 2.0 librarians were creating useful ways to better serve their patrons. His theories are definitely patron-oriented. I'm not sure how these goals would be practically worked out and financed, but for the user who does everything online his goals would be great. For some of our current patrons libraries would still need to provide traditional services and I think a lot of patron training would also have to happen for the majority of patrons to use the tools well.
To a temporary place in time... by Dr. Wendy Schultz: Whew, does she have vision or what! Who does what kind of brainstorming ideas she could come up with for any department - years into the future.
Library 2.0 is term used to describe a new set of concepts for developing and delivering library services. The name is an extension of Web2.0 and shares many of its same philosophies and concepts including harnessing the user in both design and implementation of services, embracing constant change as a development cycle over the traditional notion of upgrades, and reworking library services to meet the users in their space, as opposed to ours (libraries).Many have argued that the notion of Library 2.0 is more than just a term used to describe concepts that merely revolve around the use of technology, it also a term that can be used to describe both physical and mindset changes that are occurring within libraries to make our spaces and services more user-centric and inviting. Others within the profession have asserted that libraries have always been 2.0; collaborative, customer friendly and welcoming. But no matter which side of the debate proponents fall, both sides agree that libraries of tomorrow, even five or ten years from now, will look substantially different from libraries today.
To me this means that library staff must continue to educate themselves with the new technology, the new ways of gathering, storing and interpreting data so we can continue a key portion of our jobs and that is to provide access to and assistance in locating knowledge of all kinds to our patrons.
Thursday, February 8, 2007
Saturday, February 3, 2007
Search Engines
Whew! Those search engines certainly are set-up differently. To test all the search engines fairly, I used the same search terms each time, Tammy Paris, Osage Community Players, ocpinc, Stem Cell and mythbusters. I started my exploring of these new engines at home and then checked to see if they worked the same on the circ computer, which is my only computer at work. For me clusty was the only one I would be interested in using at this time. I'm hoping the others will improve with time and I think a couple sites had "beta" in the upper corner of the window, so I'm hoping they just need to work out the quirks.
www.exalead.com Had some nice features such as giving you a snapshot of the website to the side of the link. It has advanced search options including limiting by language, date updated, etc., Also to the right of the screen was a list to let you refine your search by excluding terms or choosing specific terms from the list. It will also let you choose how your results are displayed, links only, links & snapshots, or links & Snapshots & directories under that link. It does have sponsored sites at both the top and bottom of the results list, but they are highlighted in blue and labeled as sponsored site if you look for it. It does require signing up for an account for full functioning.
It didn't find me however when doing the "Tammy Paris" search. However, it's the only one that found the really, really, old OCP, Inc. website that should have been deleted off of the local providers server a long time ago.
www.wink.com People search: It seemed much more useful for someone looking for a date then a traditional people search. It is the only site however that found my flickrsite when I searched for "Tammy Paris."After realizing that it was searching Myspace, friendster, and other social sites, (it provides a list and also tells you at the bottom of each link where the info came from), I tried to search for a friend that has a Myspace page and lives in Linn. So I searched by her first name, female, zip code with a 25 miles and no age limit. It didn't find her but did find a teenager and besides showing her picture on the map site to the left it showed what street she lives on and a small piece of the road map to get there. I found this to be spooky and potentially dangerous. Back to that -- it's really important people especially kids and teens understand who can see the information they put online!
Web search: What makes this sites search different is it lets members rate the link relevance and block links from future searches. I didn't register so I'm not certain if the block feature would only work for that particular session, on a home computer etc., on the person's account or what. This would determine if it was useful for patrons searching on the library's computers. It appeared to be searching only wikipedia and Google for its results.
www.clusty.com This site uses clusters to show search results. To the left of the page it shows the keywords and the number of links. You can also click on a sources link to see where it searches. Some sites it uses are Ask, MSN, and Gigablast.
When I did my test searches it found a page with info on me as the third result. It found all relevant information in the "Mythbusters" search. It did a good job with "stem cell" search. The cluster topics were divided into helpful topics such as embryonic, cord blood, scientific, therapy and debate. Advanced search features will let you filter. It has a direct link to wikipedia and it will also let you change the font size on the screen (small button on bottom of page). The clusty site will do an image search, blog search and a news search. Other neat features were the icons at the end of the search results. The first icon will open the website in a new window. The 2nd icon is a magnifying glass within the link list. The third icon shows you what cluster the link came from.
www.gravee.com This site wouldn't work at all at the circ computer. Sort of worked at home on the DSL but wouldn't stay "up and running" long enough to check out the search results if it got that far. This was on Feb. 2nd and 3rd.
From the front page however I learned that the site has a link to make bookmarking very easy. It also has a feature called "claim this site" but that requires an account. This site allows uses to vote on relevance of their search results to improve searches (and depending on the users it could or it could turn out to be a popularity contest). It also has an adshare program so the user can earn up to 70% of revenue from ads on your bookmarked pages. This also has some snapshots of pages. It searches Google, yahoo, MSN and uses an algorithm and tags to do the searching.
www.mooter.com These results were also arranged in clusters though visually presented differently than clusty. When searching my name the results didn't display any terms that seemed related except the city of Paris. Stem Cell did work in presenting keywords that appeared relevant but once I had clicked on the links page I couldn't go back to the visual chart and try another direction. This site didn't have an about statement that I could find. I was trying to discover their method of searching or what sites they used etc., to know the relevance and validity of the search method. This site was also not very visually appealing to me but it was "clean" and sparse and that may appeal to others.
www.kartoo.com This site didn't work well at the circ computer. At home it worked fine. The results are arranged in a similar way to mind-mapping charts which display one "thought" flowing into another thought and sometimes flowing back around to the original thought. This site did find me on the OCP, Inc website, however when searching for OCP, Inc it found all sorts of similarly named sites but not the group. When I tried Osage Community Players it found one relevant link but this also did not go to the theater group's page rather it went to OsageConnect's community links. The stem cell search did find all relative sites. The Mythbusters search found mostly related sites, but not all were clear to me why they showed up. The site does make a mark in the center of the "paper icon" so you know you've been to that site.
www.yahoo.com This site is a gateway which provides many services including a search engine. It found relevant sites for all the searches except my name. It found way to many pages to look through them all, but narrowing the search with quotation marks worked. The other sites didn't find that many pages to worry about narrowing the search. The sites that appear on yahoo are submitted by the web page designer. They can do a free submission or pay a fee for guaranteed inclusion in the Yahoo search index and directory. Of course the sponsored sites and products are all fee based. Yahoo does provide a variety of advanced search options and it will allow you to change your search preferances and either save them to your computer or to your yahoo account.
www.exalead.com Had some nice features such as giving you a snapshot of the website to the side of the link. It has advanced search options including limiting by language, date updated, etc., Also to the right of the screen was a list to let you refine your search by excluding terms or choosing specific terms from the list. It will also let you choose how your results are displayed, links only, links & snapshots, or links & Snapshots & directories under that link. It does have sponsored sites at both the top and bottom of the results list, but they are highlighted in blue and labeled as sponsored site if you look for it. It does require signing up for an account for full functioning.
It didn't find me however when doing the "Tammy Paris" search. However, it's the only one that found the really, really, old OCP, Inc. website that should have been deleted off of the local providers server a long time ago.
www.wink.com People search: It seemed much more useful for someone looking for a date then a traditional people search. It is the only site however that found my flickrsite when I searched for "Tammy Paris."After realizing that it was searching Myspace, friendster, and other social sites, (it provides a list and also tells you at the bottom of each link where the info came from), I tried to search for a friend that has a Myspace page and lives in Linn. So I searched by her first name, female, zip code with a 25 miles and no age limit. It didn't find her but did find a teenager and besides showing her picture on the map site to the left it showed what street she lives on and a small piece of the road map to get there. I found this to be spooky and potentially dangerous. Back to that -- it's really important people especially kids and teens understand who can see the information they put online!
Web search: What makes this sites search different is it lets members rate the link relevance and block links from future searches. I didn't register so I'm not certain if the block feature would only work for that particular session, on a home computer etc., on the person's account or what. This would determine if it was useful for patrons searching on the library's computers. It appeared to be searching only wikipedia and Google for its results.
www.clusty.com This site uses clusters to show search results. To the left of the page it shows the keywords and the number of links. You can also click on a sources link to see where it searches. Some sites it uses are Ask, MSN, and Gigablast.
When I did my test searches it found a page with info on me as the third result. It found all relevant information in the "Mythbusters" search. It did a good job with "stem cell" search. The cluster topics were divided into helpful topics such as embryonic, cord blood, scientific, therapy and debate. Advanced search features will let you filter. It has a direct link to wikipedia and it will also let you change the font size on the screen (small button on bottom of page). The clusty site will do an image search, blog search and a news search. Other neat features were the icons at the end of the search results. The first icon will open the website in a new window. The 2nd icon is a magnifying glass within the link list. The third icon shows you what cluster the link came from.
www.gravee.com This site wouldn't work at all at the circ computer. Sort of worked at home on the DSL but wouldn't stay "up and running" long enough to check out the search results if it got that far. This was on Feb. 2nd and 3rd.
From the front page however I learned that the site has a link to make bookmarking very easy. It also has a feature called "claim this site" but that requires an account. This site allows uses to vote on relevance of their search results to improve searches (and depending on the users it could or it could turn out to be a popularity contest). It also has an adshare program so the user can earn up to 70% of revenue from ads on your bookmarked pages. This also has some snapshots of pages. It searches Google, yahoo, MSN and uses an algorithm and tags to do the searching.
www.mooter.com These results were also arranged in clusters though visually presented differently than clusty. When searching my name the results didn't display any terms that seemed related except the city of Paris. Stem Cell did work in presenting keywords that appeared relevant but once I had clicked on the links page I couldn't go back to the visual chart and try another direction. This site didn't have an about statement that I could find. I was trying to discover their method of searching or what sites they used etc., to know the relevance and validity of the search method. This site was also not very visually appealing to me but it was "clean" and sparse and that may appeal to others.
www.kartoo.com This site didn't work well at the circ computer. At home it worked fine. The results are arranged in a similar way to mind-mapping charts which display one "thought" flowing into another thought and sometimes flowing back around to the original thought. This site did find me on the OCP, Inc website, however when searching for OCP, Inc it found all sorts of similarly named sites but not the group. When I tried Osage Community Players it found one relevant link but this also did not go to the theater group's page rather it went to OsageConnect's community links. The stem cell search did find all relative sites. The Mythbusters search found mostly related sites, but not all were clear to me why they showed up. The site does make a mark in the center of the "paper icon" so you know you've been to that site.
www.yahoo.com This site is a gateway which provides many services including a search engine. It found relevant sites for all the searches except my name. It found way to many pages to look through them all, but narrowing the search with quotation marks worked. The other sites didn't find that many pages to worry about narrowing the search. The sites that appear on yahoo are submitted by the web page designer. They can do a free submission or pay a fee for guaranteed inclusion in the Yahoo search index and directory. Of course the sponsored sites and products are all fee based. Yahoo does provide a variety of advanced search options and it will allow you to change your search preferances and either save them to your computer or to your yahoo account.
Friday, February 2, 2007
States Visited
create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.
Well, my states visited list was rather sad anyway: Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Kansas and Arkansas. That's it. No foreign countries either.
Generators
Letter James wasn't as interesting to me at this time. Maybe if I had a bunch of personal photos I wanted to make a calendar with, or wait a minute, I can do that at FD Toys too.
www.coolgenerators.com had some neat stuff too. Including a Glitter Text Generator but it didn't appear to be compatible with blogger. It will work with MySpace though.
There's a neat text scrambler at http://www.glassgiant.com/text_scrambler/ You have to try it to believe it. You type in a couple sentences. It scrambles the inner letters and no matter how long the word your brain will still interpret the message correctly. For example here is my text scrambled:
Tihs semes srgtnae taht it cuold alultcay wrok but lte's gvie it a try. I wnoder if aynnoe wlil be albe to raed tihs wehn it is slecbamrd.
Okay, the last word would be a little hard to figure out if you didn't know what the text generator was doing. Just in case it's so easy for me to read because I wrote it, here's the text as I typed it in to the scrambler.
This seems strange that it could actually work but let's give it a try. I wonder if anyone will be able to read this when it is scrambled.
I could definitely, spend a lot of time playing with these generators and probably not even test one percent of what's out there on the net.
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Monday, January 22, 2007
Flickr Lesson
The photo here is from the Linn Christmas Parade 2006. Aren't the ladies from the Linn Book Club a fun, crazy bunch?
The Happy Bookers are wearing sumu suits that are Halloween costumes filled with air. The ladies carried signs saying "Celebrate Reading in a Big Way" or Giant-size picture books.
Wow! What a great lesson. This has been my favorite lesson so far. I was so interested in what flickr had to offer that I've already set-up my own free membership and uploaded photos Jan and I had at the library. Apparently, I went on quite awhile to Corey the first evening I got home after looking at flickr about all the options it would give us and how we could set up a group (private, invitation only) for Corey's family so we could share the photos we've all taken but never had printed and had copies made to share. Now we could post pictures from recent family events and all those photos of the cute nieces and the handsome little nephew.
I read through all the sections I could find and several FAQs to see how the privacy settings worked and printing photos from the web. I like the options of either having the photos mailed to me or picking them up at Target. It's also nice that I can choose a variety of sizes.
Then while searching through the photos others had posted I found a community theater flickr group with 43 members, where people can post photos of their group's recent productions. This gave me the idea of seeing if Osage Community Theater, Inc., should have it's own flickr account. Then I checked into the pro accounts and started emailing with Robin about the possibilities of having photos on flickr appear on the OCP, Inc. website that is hosted by her web design company. Check out www.ocpinc.org The annual meeting was coming up, so I decided to ask the board to have an account.
They approved this Saturday at the meeting. The board thought for $25 a year, why not give it a try and if we don't like it then the membership won't be renewed. I'm now looking forward to being able to post the 100 plus photos from the most recent OCP, Inc. productions to the group's flickr account. I've just started working on the account. Check it out at www.flickr.com/photos/ocpinc/
I read through all the sections I could find and several FAQs to see how the privacy settings worked and printing photos from the web. I like the options of either having the photos mailed to me or picking them up at Target. It's also nice that I can choose a variety of sizes.
Then while searching through the photos others had posted I found a community theater flickr group with 43 members, where people can post photos of their group's recent productions. This gave me the idea of seeing if Osage Community Theater, Inc., should have it's own flickr account. Then I checked into the pro accounts and started emailing with Robin about the possibilities of having photos on flickr appear on the OCP, Inc. website that is hosted by her web design company. Check out www.ocpinc.org The annual meeting was coming up, so I decided to ask the board to have an account.
They approved this Saturday at the meeting. The board thought for $25 a year, why not give it a try and if we don't like it then the membership won't be renewed. I'm now looking forward to being able to post the 100 plus photos from the most recent OCP, Inc. productions to the group's flickr account. I've just started working on the account. Check it out at www.flickr.com/photos/ocpinc/
You can check out my public photos on my account at www.flickr.com/photos/parist/
Library Info: LaGrange Park Library's page gave good examples of sets: which are ways to organize your photos. Colorado College Tutt Library's page has photos which are a nice size and have titles and captions. The Library postcards page is an example of a group.
FLICKR PART 2
FLICKR PART 2
Tags are keywords used to search for photos. Groups can be set-up as either private (invitation only), public or people on your contact list.
Mash-ups and 3rd party sites: Mash-ups are websites or an application that combines contents from more than one source into an integrated experience. This includes web feeds such as RSS or Atom and JavaScript. APIs (application programming interfaces) are used to create mash-ups. Flickr has an open API, this means anyone can write their own program to present public Flickr data (photos, tags, profiles or groups) in new and different ways.
The example mash-ups were neat to look at though I couldn't do all of them from circ, but they all worked on my home computer.
I created a librarian trading card (see above) and it is posted on my flickr site as well as the librarian trading card group on flickr. I did mine from home, since I didn't have any photos here at the library and the circ computers have limited graphics. Since I was home, I ended up receiving some "technical help" from my resident gaming geek. He instantly recognized the card format as the Magik game cards. So, my card is set-up the way his older playing cards were designed and worded.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Week 3 MySpace
Wow, what a lot of varying thoughts about libraries and MySpace and similar sites. I think that MRRL having a MySpace page may be a good idea, but there are some things the articles and blogs brought up that need to be addressed.
Would MySpace be relevant to our patrons?
Would the library be viewed as "invading the teens' space"?
Questions of responsibility exist. Is the library in anyway responsible for the content on a "friend's" page?
Will a MySpace page work well with the personality of the library itself and the staff member(s) who are setting it up and updating the site?
What could having a MySpace page do for the library's reputation with teens and adults? Both positive and negative?
If "friends" sites are one click away from the library's page will the public associate the friend's page with the library?
How could the page represent the library as opposed to representing just the staff member(s) who created it?
Can MySpace use posted content any way they like? Can it be removed by the library or by MySpace staff at any time?
How do you tell how much a MySpace site is utilized by your patrons, besides the number of "friends" listed of course? Is there a way to keep track of visits? Is there a way to know if it's local people, libraries, authors etc., that is viewing the page?
Other thoughts from the articles and blog discussion:
The Stoneham Public Library listed the age as the library's age and also has a cool slide show of the covers of new teen books. I like that Steele Creek Teen page included MySpace Safety information. The Denver Public Library (eVolver) not only has music and movie reviews but is even holding a YouTube contest for teens to submit their YouTube videos. The Carnegie Library of Pittsburg site has an appealing design.
David Lee King who is a digital branch and services manager (how cool is that they have a "digital branch") and uses his space well. It's nice that the blog part of MySpace will allow all "friends" of the library to be updated on events and new items at the library just by updating the blog. I am concerned about the amount of time it would take a staff member to keep the MySpace updated and relevant for the teens (which seems to be most libraries' primary audience). The teens are used to instant facts and entertainment. To keep them coming page the page would need to be updated regularly but also set-up in a fun appealing way.
MySpace Rant: I agree that education and parental involvement is the key to any kind of safety on the Internet. I hear some of our parents take the Internet way to lightly with their teens and others know nothing about it so they won't let their kids use it here either.
Librarian in Black: Is any potential danger the same as it is in a chat or email for inappropriate material, fraud or luring someone to met you? Most of the concerns above came from this blog.
Decoding My Space: Teens need to know Anyone can see what the put on their MySpace Page. MySpace started as a site for artists and musicians to connect. By Sept. 2006 it had more than 100 million profiles. One teen in the article was quoted as considering the Internet a more "evolved way of communicating instead of the telephone, cellphone or IM."
The article also commented about parents not understanding the technology so they avoid setting guidelines for their kids online. So, maybe the library should consider pointing out online safety to the parents as well. I know we do some on the Internet permission form but a lot of parent's don't read it, they just sign or they say something like "Oh, my kid won't go anywhere or do anything he/she shouldn't." Rarely, I've seen a parent take their 13 or 14-year-old aside and read through the Internet safety tips and discuss these with their teen. The article specifically mentioned that "friend" online does not mean the same thing as it does in the physical world. "Friend" just means a person I want to pay attention to online. Some teens will add strangers to their "friends" list just to increase the number of friends they have and appear popular.
MySpace is attempting to add some security measures. Such as they limit contact of anyone 18 or older to a teen unless the teen adds them to their "friends" list first. The MySpace staff also remove nude photos, and things that promote hate or racism. But anyone can still post suggestive photos or even photos of the crime they just committed. Some teens have been arrested after bragging online about a crime then posting the proof. Students have also used MySpace and other similar software, chat and email to bully others. Some students have even made up a bogus site about their classmates.
Teens, college students and even adults need to keep in mind that anyone can view what they have posted and the post could hurt college admissions and being hired.
Wired Magazine: Social Networking for Parents: I thought Parry's comments were good and to the point for both teens and parents.
Would MySpace be relevant to our patrons?
Would the library be viewed as "invading the teens' space"?
Questions of responsibility exist. Is the library in anyway responsible for the content on a "friend's" page?
Will a MySpace page work well with the personality of the library itself and the staff member(s) who are setting it up and updating the site?
What could having a MySpace page do for the library's reputation with teens and adults? Both positive and negative?
If "friends" sites are one click away from the library's page will the public associate the friend's page with the library?
How could the page represent the library as opposed to representing just the staff member(s) who created it?
Can MySpace use posted content any way they like? Can it be removed by the library or by MySpace staff at any time?
How do you tell how much a MySpace site is utilized by your patrons, besides the number of "friends" listed of course? Is there a way to keep track of visits? Is there a way to know if it's local people, libraries, authors etc., that is viewing the page?
Other thoughts from the articles and blog discussion:
The Stoneham Public Library listed the age as the library's age and also has a cool slide show of the covers of new teen books. I like that Steele Creek Teen page included MySpace Safety information. The Denver Public Library (eVolver) not only has music and movie reviews but is even holding a YouTube contest for teens to submit their YouTube videos. The Carnegie Library of Pittsburg site has an appealing design.
David Lee King who is a digital branch and services manager (how cool is that they have a "digital branch") and uses his space well. It's nice that the blog part of MySpace will allow all "friends" of the library to be updated on events and new items at the library just by updating the blog. I am concerned about the amount of time it would take a staff member to keep the MySpace updated and relevant for the teens (which seems to be most libraries' primary audience). The teens are used to instant facts and entertainment. To keep them coming page the page would need to be updated regularly but also set-up in a fun appealing way.
MySpace Rant: I agree that education and parental involvement is the key to any kind of safety on the Internet. I hear some of our parents take the Internet way to lightly with their teens and others know nothing about it so they won't let their kids use it here either.
Librarian in Black: Is any potential danger the same as it is in a chat or email for inappropriate material, fraud or luring someone to met you? Most of the concerns above came from this blog.
Decoding My Space: Teens need to know Anyone can see what the put on their MySpace Page. MySpace started as a site for artists and musicians to connect. By Sept. 2006 it had more than 100 million profiles. One teen in the article was quoted as considering the Internet a more "evolved way of communicating instead of the telephone, cellphone or IM."
The article also commented about parents not understanding the technology so they avoid setting guidelines for their kids online. So, maybe the library should consider pointing out online safety to the parents as well. I know we do some on the Internet permission form but a lot of parent's don't read it, they just sign or they say something like "Oh, my kid won't go anywhere or do anything he/she shouldn't." Rarely, I've seen a parent take their 13 or 14-year-old aside and read through the Internet safety tips and discuss these with their teen. The article specifically mentioned that "friend" online does not mean the same thing as it does in the physical world. "Friend" just means a person I want to pay attention to online. Some teens will add strangers to their "friends" list just to increase the number of friends they have and appear popular.
MySpace is attempting to add some security measures. Such as they limit contact of anyone 18 or older to a teen unless the teen adds them to their "friends" list first. The MySpace staff also remove nude photos, and things that promote hate or racism. But anyone can still post suggestive photos or even photos of the crime they just committed. Some teens have been arrested after bragging online about a crime then posting the proof. Students have also used MySpace and other similar software, chat and email to bully others. Some students have even made up a bogus site about their classmates.
Teens, college students and even adults need to keep in mind that anyone can view what they have posted and the post could hurt college admissions and being hired.
Wired Magazine: Social Networking for Parents: I thought Parry's comments were good and to the point for both teens and parents.
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