Grain of Salt

Facebook About Face

2010-02-18T12:52:00.003-05:00

I've been on and off Facebook a couple of times since my last post. After the earthquake in Haiti, I decide to re-up so that I could share the Partners in Health link. And I must admit that during the blizzards of 2010, Facebook was a wonderful way to stay in touch and amuse myself. I'll see what happens now that things have calmed down.

Facebook, Shmacebook

2009-09-02T12:39:00.003-04:00

I finally broke down and created a Facebook page. I am now wondering why. I love my friends, but keeping up with all their doings is already wearing this introvert out.

One of these days, months, years, I may really want to have a way to update the universe on my own doings, but that time has not come.

For now, email works for me.

Picasa Puzzlement

2009-06-26T13:50:00.002-04:00

In the spirit of Web 2.0, I wanted to find a way for you to be able to go to Google's Picasa and look at my slide show of our kick-off. However, although I made the photos public, they don't show up when I do a Picasa site search. If anyone knows what to do to make the photos searchable, please let me know.

2009-05-03T13:48:00.003-04:00

Happy 90th birthday to Pete Seeger!

Where's his Google doodle?

SeniorBlog

2009-03-13T15:04:00.002-04:00

My 79 year old activist mother-in-law now has a blog. Intriguingly, the most current entry talks about her next court appearance. No entries since then… Might she be in the clink?

Perfect Storm

2009-03-02T13:05:00.002-05:00

IMHO, a perfect storm delivers enough snow to close the library but not enough to close our street. In fact, the snow plow visited our little two blocks of nowhere before noon (a first) and we were able to pack up the skis and investigate the local rail trail. This is my husband. He took one pic of me in which I look like a nesting doll with a blotch where my nose should be, which would preserve the supposed anonymity of this blog but crush my self esteem, so it's not here. Not visible in the pics are the Easy-Gos which happily stopped short of plowing through our half-mile winter wonderland.

iStockphoto

2009-02-17T12:37:00.004-05:00

A friend who recently retired from the county school system has developed a longtime hobby into a little retirement income using iStockphoto. Editors, publicists, and designers can search this website for photos loaded and tagged by digital photographers. Prices for use seem to start at about a dollar, but over time a popular photograph can bring in a nice chunk of change.

There are certainly of few of my fellow bloggers who are wonderful photographers and might want to check the site out. And I actually found one of the photos my friend described to me by searching for the words popcorn foot.

The Human Factor

2009-01-29T15:46:00.002-05:00

I wonder how many of you showed up for work this morning? If so, don't be embarrassed or unduly put out. I woke up at 8 a.m. to a bright, sunshiny day and the thought that we might have a delayed opening never crossed my mind. It wasn't until I checked my email two hours later that I saw the message from alerts.com. Had I been on the early shift I bet I would have shown up early. Way too early. The lesson learned from this, I suppose, is to check your email, call your branch, or pull up our website when there's even a slight possibility of a delayed opening.

Microsoft Office Live

2009-01-26T12:04:00.003-05:00

Microsoft Office Live inserted itself into my life this weekend while I was trying to update an Excel spreadsheet. This free document sharing program from Microsoft is modeled on Zoho and GoogleDocs, although you need to download Microsoft's program to use it. If the library decides we want it, we'll need ISS to install the software on our staff and/or public computers.

Because Office Live supports Microsoft Office Word and Excel, I think that it might, in the end, be a more attractive option than GoogleDocs. However, right now I can't get rid of the annoying Office Live ad that pops up every time I open a Microsoft document, even when I tell it that I never want to see it again. I would not want to inflict that on the rest of my colleagues.

Musings

2009-01-08T15:05:00.005-05:00

I've been wondering recently just what my dad would have done on the web if he'd been born just a little later. Unfortunately, by the time attractive web pages with bells and whistles arrived he was already suffering from Parkinson's disease. Not that he didn't try. We bought my folks a computer. Our first sign that all was not well was when we had to extract my dad's Visa card from the floppy disc drive. Eventually, after we could no longer get the thing to work, he literally took it apart. I had my first look at the insides of a pc.

In his working days, my father was a wonderfully witty book review editor and columnist, and also a talented photographer. Although in general a techno-klutz (he never learned to drive), he did learn to use a word processor. I think he might have enjoyed having a forum beyond the Sunday paper for his take on the world. He would have loved posting his photos. And the man who wrote about one letter to me in his whole life might actually have had a use for e-mail.

Whether I could have turned my dad into a competent computer user I don't know. But every time I help a senior use the library computers I know that nothing they do on them can surprise me.

Streaming Screaming

2008-12-26T15:08:00.004-05:00

During a slow hour off the desk, I finally turned on some streaming audio from Naxos Library. The featured music all seemed to be classical except for Snack Time by Barenaked Ladies. I do enjoy classical music, but somehow the day seemed to call out for Barenaked Ladies. I enjoyed listening for a while, despite occasional static and some abrupt stops when mouse-clicking in other applications. If you are not a music purist, you can probably live with the glitches for a time, but eventually you may reach your tolerance limit. I am going to try this at home and compare the sound quality.

I did wonder how much bandwidth I was claiming. (While I was streaming, were patrons screaming?) A colleague here was watching a Skillsoft video online this fall and later found out that her web activity had slowed the patrons' computers to a crawl.

Spreek je Dutch?

2008-12-03T19:34:00.003-05:00

AquaBrowser's HQ is in Amsterdam. Who knew? I am ruminating about this morning's session with an AquaBrowser trainer via the bat phone. Lots of useful features, although the vocab was not as user friendly as I'd been led to suppose. Syndetic, for instance, and that acronym with four letters, three of which are frb. Supposedly anyone who can use Amazon can use this. I can use Amazon. Sort of... I do like being able to see the refine options on the results page.

Then there's the word cloud. When I put in barbara rosenblatt, did I get the correct spelling, which is rosenblat? No. I got Greenblatt, barbra, barbera, havers, lynley. Stop trying so hard, AquaBrowser! I then clicked on author and retrieved a list of Rosenblatts. Including Rosenblatt, Barbara, which was the first listing. So, AquaBrowser was smart enough to put the last name first, but it still didn't show me what I wanted. Maybe there is a way to scroll through the list that I missed.

One interesting feature is the ability to add an RSS feed of a search to your own reader, blog, etc. I occasionally do a PowerSearch in iBistro to look for new DVDs. AquaBrowser would feed me titles right to my reader. You can even select to be fed every new title added to our entire catalog. Yikes. I am tempted...

A wonderful feature--AquaBrowser will remember your username and PIN after you've typed them in once when placing a hold. No punishing you for not remembering to login first.

Ok. Here is my greatest apprehension. I was practicing back at the branch. I brought up one detailed record, because that is the only way you can see what's in and what's out. And the little circle flower thingy went around and around for a lot longer than I'd like. Will bandwidth issues slow down our catalog?

2008-11-04T10:13:00.003-05:00

Montpelier, lifelong home of our fourth president James Madison, has recently reopened to the public and on a windy Monday last week we took a tour. The house is not yet furnished, but many of the paintings that hung in the great hall have been restored to their places. While visiting, I remembered that James Madison (father of the U.S. Consitution) was the person I chose to investigate for a presidential papers project in my Government Documents class.

How things have changed in 30 years. Now most of President Madison's papers are available digitally and some are searchable. And the world of government documents has changed too. Back then we were dependent on the depository libraries--at least one per state--that kept and catalogued the vast array of gov docs. These libraries still exist, but the U.S. government has also embraced computerization and digitalization to make resources more convenient and managable. And the federal, state, and local governments continue to add user friendly features to their databases. For instance, it sure was easy this year to help people who didn't know where they were supposed to vote.

Hats off to the librarians, archivists, and subject specialists who continue to find ways to make our government documents accessible to all.

Good Reads

2008-10-08T21:43:00.002-04:00

Thank you, Curious Claudia, for showing me how to add the Good Reads widget to my blog. Now if I could only find time to add more than seven books to my bookshelf...

Cloris Leachman's Voting Bloc

2008-10-07T22:36:00.002-04:00

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, I have become hooked on Dancing with the Stars.

As in politics, the best dancers among the "stars" do not always win the voters' hearts. This season, 82 year old Cloris Leachman, despite low scores awarded her by the judges, has outlasted at least two technically better dancers with the help of a voting bloc of appreciative fans.

I am not hooked enough to waste money actually voting for the dancers. (Nor do I know how to do so. I obviously need a Web 2.0 texting lesson on my Go phone.) I would be fascinated to know the demographics of her electorate. Are they all golden oldies? Or are they simply people who like her guts, enjoy her wit, and think that the program would be a poorer thing without her? After all, Leachman is the closest thing to a "star" that I've seen on the show. (This is making a distinction between famous people, like athletes, and stars, who are famous performers.) I know that Cloris is going to be voted off the island at some point, but wouldn't it be fun to see her win the mirror ball. In the meantime, I may try to get my 82 year old mother hooked.

Lowest Common Denominator?

2008-09-30T08:26:00.001-04:00

Last night I added my first widget to iGoogle. And the lucky widget was--Dancing with the Stars. Last April my fourteen year old niece visited from London and got me hooked on it. In fact, so hooked was I that during our recent trip to Wyoming and Montana we hiked during the day and watched Dancing with the Stars at night. Apologies to my husband--the long-suffering guy in the blue shirt, who has seen about as much as he wants of Cloris Leachman's body.

***Update*** My Dancing with the Stars widget had a very brief life on iGoogle. When I signed into iGoogle to print out my September roving calender, the Adobe Flash 9 add-on crashed the internet. How embarrassing it was to confess to tech support why this had happened. Lesson learned: what works on my computer at home may not be compatible with the system at work.

Happenings Unleashed

2008-09-06T10:15:00.000-04:00

How cool would it be to have an interactive online Happenings which would give the readers the ability to sign up for programs, ask questions like "would my four year old enjoy this?," or comment on books?

And maybe an online version of Happenings could have a space for "this just in" to publicize tours or programs that didn't make the print deadline. And a space for program photos to which branches could contribute. A space to advertise new Recommended Sites or licensed databases. Interactive=Friendly.

RSS feeds vs. widgets

2008-09-06T10:05:00.000-04:00

Judging from our blog posts, setting up RSS feeds seems to be one of the more challenging explorations. I am wondering whether the library might want to think about offering widgets instead: programming widgets, readers' advisory widgets, etc. (Ok, I am still not exactly sure what a widget is, but I think my husband has one from NOAA sitting on his desktop that gives the forecast for our zip code.) An RSS feed that isn't particularly active might simply be purged from our users' computers, but a widget gives them control over when to click.

Blogophile at last

2008-08-23T12:16:00.000-04:00

This morning the penny dropped. I’d been thinking about what was the most valuable thing I’d gained from doing this Web 2.0 project and realized that the sense of community I felt reading your blogs and corresponding online far outweighed the pluses or minuses of any of the sites or online tools I’d explored. Then I realized that this is exactly why we have online social networking, and that I belatedly have found an online social network that means something to me.

I’ve never enjoyed talk radio or even the comments that newspaper websites permit their readers to make. Too often people tend to forget their manners. So maybe it helps to already know the people you’re involved with online or at least to have something as important as your workplace in common. Thus far our fellow explorers have been generous with their knowledge and kind to their colleagues.

If our library started a blog for our patrons, would they have enough in common with each other and us to be able to build an online community too? As odd as it seems, we could even guide them through the some of the same explorations we’ve been doing. Or we could provide a forum for people to discuss their favorite books with each other or with us. We could even (gasp) provide a public forum for suggestions and complaints.
The key would be to stay involved ourselves: suggesting great new reads, plugging our reference services, and responding to suggestions with reasoned replies. Could we do it? I think we should try

BeepBeepBzzBzz

2008-08-06T19:37:00.000-04:00

A colleague and I were discussing how satisfying it would be to track down those errant books and DVDs by sticking RFIDs in them and using tracking devices to find them. You would tune your tracker to the right frequency and be pulled magnetically to the correct location. And then five years later you'd get brain cancer and see lots of pretty pictures...

Today, though, was a time of being told off by frustrated patrons who were leaving the library because the computers were too slow... Two patrons in a row this afternoon. One woman, iced latte in hand (how'd we miss that?) first wanted to know where the nearest Kinkos was and then declared that she'd have to go to the law library, which was way too quiet but at least had computers that worked. She strode out, ice jiggling in her plastic cup and a wild look in her eyes.

Oh for a computer whisperer!

While I hope that we are just having growing pains, I don't get the sense that a solution is in sight just yet. I think we need to take a hard look at the level below which we must not sink. Maybe these patrons will come back. Or maybe they'll go to Kinkos...

GoogleDoc Experiment

2008-07-30T13:58:00.000-04:00

A few of us have been messing around with the Info desk schedule in GoogleDocs. The Info desk skedmeister creates it as an MS Excel spreadsheet and stores it on our common server. Recently we uploaded the sked in GoogleDocs and invited the other schedulers in as collaborators. The schedule imported beautifully, but we realized that the drawback to having the schedule on the web is the URL. To keep the same URL, we would need to delete the current schedule and reload each new schedule weekly, probably on Saturday, which might not be very convenient. If we let Google change the URL weekly, we’d have to refer back to our email for the link. It is fun to play with, until I remember the fifteen other work tasks that should be taking priority.

Suburban Myth

2008-07-23T14:37:00.000-04:00

I am fairly gullible. And suggestible. Any magician can fool me; anyone with a pocket watch can hypnotize me. Therefore, I suppose that it shouldn't have surprised me that I believed it when I read that black screens save energy. After all, our ancestor computers all had black screens on which little white DOS code paraded. However, Google posted a bloglet last year that asserts that this is wrong. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-black-new-green.html

Maybe it's time to pick a new background for my blog...

Sharing Skeds

2008-07-20T20:27:00.000-04:00

At WST, our desk schedule is revised almost every day. What about sharing desk schedules using the Google spreadsheet? Imagine the snow falling fast and furious and Chief ****** calling with the news that the libraries will be closed. Firing up the computer before the power goes out, the Branch Manager calls the morning shift with the news.

I know that the kebosh was put on posting the closing on a shared site (aside from our web site), but this would at least make things a bit easier. Perhaps the Meeting Room sked could go on a shared site. And, if branches wanted to be collegial, we could all look at each other's skeds. And dare I say it, perhaps we could even get hq to buy in and learn who's on an 8-4 sked, who's on an 8:30 to 3:30 sked, who's in the building, etc.

Google Reader Redux

2008-07-17T18:39:00.000-04:00

New to me is Google Reader
Could it be that it’s a feeder?
Like an RSS thing-gummy
For a Web 2 point 0 dummy?

Ok, I am floundering. I subscribed to a couple of your blogs and now it's talking about sharing and friends. What's that all about. I learned how to share a document from Google docs, but it didn't say anything about friends.

(I know that you probably tried to teach me this in the RSS feed exploration but I am not too good at reading instructions.)

Detritus in Cyberspace

2008-07-13T15:26:00.000-04:00

I was talking with blogger Belinda Blomscogg this morning and mentioned how much I enjoyed her link to Library Lovers LiveJournal. (You have to read the post that links to the YouTube video of the 61 year old librarian who was ticketed because she held up a McCain=Bush sign on the plaza outside the building in Denver where the candidate was going to speak. As she commented after being given her court date, “Why would Republicans, who voted for Bush, be offended by this?")

I had to admit, however, that I had signed up for the service and neglected to write down my username and password. How many times have we warned patrons about this? Now I am taking up another tiny useless bit of space on the web.

It seems as though we are still in the expansion phase of the web and that more efficient storage is making growth possible. What a lot of free services Google provides even as its stock goes down! How can this continue? Won’t even Google find storage too expensive and start to charge? And isn’t it green to clean up after ourselves, even in cyberspace?

Meanwhile, all our old online projects, neglected and rejected e-mail accounts, memberships in passé social networking sites are blipping around the net, like worn-out satellites in outer space. When they start to fall, who are they going to hit?

I'm back...

2008-07-11T15:47:00.000-04:00

I am now hooked on airing every passing thought. Or should I say venting? I just tried the Read-alike Wizard in Gale's Books and Authors. I entered the title Amulet of Samarkand and instead of the list of suggestions, I got one hit--The Amulet of Samarkand! The wizard didn't even suggest the two sequels.

Who is the bot behind the curtain?

This is kind of Web 2.0-ie, isn't it? Because it looks as though Gale is trying to be all interactive.

Oh, and the Browse by subject, character, etc. feature doesn't let you change your mind after you enter one of the limited occupations or subjects. You have to clear your selections (slowly...) and try again.

So long, and thanks for all the dish...

2008-07-09T11:09:00.000-04:00

Web 2.0 exploration has been fun! I have particularly enjoyed viewing all your blogs. You have posted some great tips and comments. I will miss lurking and just generally messing around.

As far as what will be most useful on the job--

When helping patrons: Google docs and Zoho
When helping my own aging brain: del.icio.us
When thinking about how to jazz up our web site: Flickr and blogs
When thinking about how to communicate with each other: blogs and WIKIs

How about using Google docs or another collaborative, web-based docs site when we are creating new ClickHere! scripts or One-on-One documents?
What about blogging our fave reads with the ability for our users to comment?
How about putting our programming and outreach photos on our web site in slide show format?
How about broadening the number of people who can contribute to our web page so that it won't be a burden to a few?

Hasta la vista en linea, bebes.

Tagging

2008-07-08T09:33:00.000-04:00

Tagging. New name for a technique I learned in library school 29 years ago in my classification class. Bert Boyce, one of my favorite professors, gave us a project that measured relevance against inclusivity. (This, btw, was back when you had to create computer programs by typing commands on punch cards.)

Ever since, I have valued relevance over inclusivity. When working with a patron, it seems better to retrieve a few highly relevant hits than to bring back page after page of peripheral results. Yet, over the years, most of the visiting licensed database trainers have seemed to think that we are going to be more impressed with high numbers than with relevance.

It will be interesting to see how AquaBrowser handles this.

del.icio.us is delightful!

2008-07-08T09:18:00.000-04:00

Thank you, orangerful and Web 2.0 exploration team! I am very impressed with del.icio.us, so far. I loaded the buttons onto my work computer with no problems. Sites like del.icio.us that let you view your stuff from anywhere are my favorites. Now all I have to do is remember the del.icio.us web address...

WIKIs and Truthiness

2008-07-07T12:13:00.000-04:00

Are WIKIs the new PowerPoints? The plain vanilla, Travelling Pants, (you don't really believe that one size fits all, do you?), darling of Web 2.0ers everywhere?

My objections to WIKIs:

They're dull. I see one and my eyelids start to droop. I understand the advantages of not having to know how to design web pages, but I would like to see a little creativity in the layout.
Truthiness. I am still leery of the way content can be changed. The way I look at it, each edit by a new author ought to link to a new page. I do admit that many of our current electronic licensed databases are far from error free. (Compare the different Gale biography articles for a musician and see how many errors you can spot.) However, my feeling is that if WIKIs are the written equivalent of talk radio they are to be taken with a Grain of Salt...
Why are so many out of date? The advantage to WIKIs is that they are so easy to update, the perfect collegial, collaborative tool. If so, why are so many out of date, orphans of the web? If it's everybody's job, could it turn out that it's really everybody else's job?

I did enjoy WIKIs in Plain English and think that for a collabortive project with a firm deadline and timeline, WIKIs could work well. Maybe a WIKI-Blog hybrid might be an answer for something like our strategic plan.

ZoHo Assignment

2008-07-01T15:39:00.000-04:00

Did you know that the first use of nerd in modern English is attributed to Dr. Seuss, whose zookeeper wannabe captured a nerd, along with a nerkle and proo, to exhibit in his menagerie in If I Ran the Zoo? Such are the factoids that my husband reads to me from TLS every five minutes while I am wasting my time doing mega-Sudokus.

I must say that ZoHo is rather SlowHo.

I tried importing my ZoHo doc to the blog, but lost the formatting. So, here is the photo I used of a sea otter, the ultimate anti-nerd.

I am quite a fan of the Google spreadsheet. It's simpler to use than Excel. Sort of the equivalent of DOS and Windows. I am sure that for professional number crunchers Excel is so worth it, but for someone like me, who basically wants to add and multiply and just occasionally average things out, it's great.

Both ZoHo and Google want you to get an account before using them. But both seem simple to operate afterward and a great way to save and share info on the web.

Library Thing

2008-06-30T16:51:00.000-04:00

Only space for 200 titles in the free Library Thing account? My thriftiness is bumping up against my appetite for books. So far, I am not a big fan. The cover art seems to go with editions I don't have. I got bored after my second entry. We have used Library Thing for our inhouse book club and for our Book Club books. Has anyone reviewed for Library Thing? I remember my brief career as book reviewer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer (done under an assumed name so no one would know I was reviewing for my father) and how I lost the job because I was too picky.

RSS Feeds

2008-06-27T15:58:00.000-04:00

So, RSS feeds are little shortcuts to web stuff. I added the top news from the Washington Post to my blog. I might play around with this one. It would be fun to get my owns customized comics page too. Our patrons might enjoy having short cuts to their accounts. I will have to visit some library web pages to see what they've done.

Using Flickr to publicize our programs

2008-06-20T12:05:00.000-04:00

We post some great photos to our programming blog, but no one but us sees them. What would be involved in setting up accounts like Flickr? Would we need to get permission to use pics of minors (or majors) if we don't tag their names? At my branch, we do sometimes add photos to our Happenings display to show people that a good time was had by all at BIB or SRC. Flickr would take it out of the branch into the home pcs.

BTW, I checked Flickr for photos with the tag Annapolis and found some wonderful pics by a photographer named Toshio.

First and foremost and possibly last

2008-06-18T14:25:00.000-04:00

Ok. The first thing I noticed when I tried to create a blog was how many blog names were not available. I seem to be behind the curve again. I tried:

Sound and Fury
Signifying Nothing
Last Resort
Bottom of the Barrel

all of which seemed like appropriate names for a web study project blog. However, they were taken, taken, taken...

I fell back on goneawaylake, the title of one of my favorite children's books. But is it legal? Ah well, I am hoping that this blog languishes in the quiet obscurity it deserves.