Final Final Posting

Last post was directly from Word following what Megan said in her blog about how that was possible I didn't like the font, so I guess I could have fixed that before I posted. It is a good trick, though, and does save time.

Final blog for 27 things.

 

I can't believe I'm nearly finished with the 27 things. Some of them really stand out as exciting wonderful things and I can see how they would be useful to the library world and to individuals. Others I can do personally do without.

Some I never did really succeed at (magazine cover) and couldn't care less. Others, I may try to go back to and explore further. I apparently will have to go back to Thingfo as they are not currently accepting new registrants as they work on a new version.

I will keep the blog in case I have profound thoughts I need to share with you all. I will probably continue to study Italian via Mango for my next Mediterranean cruise ;-D although it did seem incredibly repetitious. "Salve, come sta" some 200 times. Twitter has been interesting for the past week but I can't see it in the long run although I have discovered fellow library trainers across the country.

YouTube is amusing and I can see the library possibilities for short online training segments. I wasn't planning on doing Facebook as it didn't seem to be one of the 27 Things but when I saw on Twitter that Sacramento Public Library now had a Facebook page, I tried to visit it. Seems that you need to be registered on Facebook to do that so I now have a Facebook page as well… and actually have a couple of friends. (Even my 24 year old son was willing to be my friend if I didn't embarrass him too much. The tweets from my friends that I had already read in Twitter seem to have appeared on my "wall" so I'm not sure how that interconnection works. That's one of the things I want to explore further.

Overall it has been a good experience and I'm glad we did this.

I Tube, You Tube, We all Tube

Just spent an enjoyable 20 minutes investigating You Tube. With the not very original search term of "library" I came across all sorts of wonderful stuff- both serious and funny. There were a variety of tours and tutorials. My favorite was this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHljR4LYmOA which I will try to embed later today if I can figure out how to do it. The title was Tour the Library and it was from Harper College. I also watched part of a very old vocational film entitled Your Life Work: the Librarian and a Trailer from the film Hollywood Librarian. Hmm-maybe we could get a copy of that for Training Day...

Side Effects

At the adult services meeting last week, several of us commented on the progress of our 27 Things program. Before the meeting, I had checked the numbers on the registration list and saw that we had ~130 who had signed up. Although I don't think there are quite that many on the official blog list, it certainly has been interesting to read what my co-workers have written. I've discovered a fellow bird lover and one dealing with house construction or remodeling issues. I've read some deep and thoughtful comments about the state of our libraries and I'm hoping that some of my favorite bloggers will continue to post occasionally even after the official program is over. It is this side effect of getting to know one another through our blogs (the 28th Thing, if you will) that has actually been one of the most useful for me.

Backpack-Web 2.0 winner

I just investigated Backpack as a Web 2.0 application. Because I was enjoying playing with zoho, I looked at the nominee and winner's lists until I found zoho. I saw that it had come in second in the category of organization. The application that came in first in that category was called Backpack and it was impressive-allowing groups to share everything from calendars and documents to maps and images. We can certainly do all that on Outlook 2007 - but Backpack seemed to do it more seamlessly and was completely web-based.

Alas, Backpack was not one of those free applications. In fact, for even a small group (say a small business or a work team of up to 6 people) it was about $25 a month.

I guess I'll stick to Outlook and try to master wikis...

zooming with zoho

As someone who has been teaching word processing since the late eighties, I didn't expect to have any trouble with the basic Zoho. Indeed, it is all fairly intuitive (or more correctly - similar enough to any other word processing program) and seems easy to use.

Now though, comes the test of all the other features. I can already see that it would be useful if you didn't need to copy and paste a section of text into your email or attach a file just to be able to work on a document from home or in a different location. And it would certainly be useful for team work like the Training Day group which gets going this week.

First, I will put in a link. Next, I will try to send it to my blog... Wow! I can't believe how easy that was. All I had to do was click on the share tab and there it was. I wish I had seen this two weeks ago- I still have a document on my home PC that was the blog required for Thing 14 or 15..Thoughts on Web 2.0

Del.icio.us and Technorati

Okay, I am now officially a week(or two?)behind in my 27 Library Things and as I am not partying this Memorial Day afternoon I decided to explore del.icio.us and technorati. I can see the use of both but was not inspired sufficiently to set up an account in either. As a trainer, I was much more interested in how one actually puts together a podcast (the Otter resource). On the other hand,I was put off by the us.ef.ul post by John (Nov. 2004). He appeared to be giving clear, specific directions as to how to use del.icio.us but wasn't really all that straight forward. I suspect that his instructions are a bit out of date anyway.

As I really only have three computers on which I keep bookmarks (home, work and the traveling lab trainer's laptop), I'm not really sure how useful it would be for me personally to keep them organized with delicious. My spouse is the king of the bookmarks at home and I usually find it easier just to type in the URL rather than go scrolling through 200+ sites that he found interesting...At work, my bookmarks are limited and fairly well organized.

Technorati does sound much more interesting to use-although, as someone pointed out, knowing where all the blogs on celebrity babies are located is not all that useful. I'll need to play with it more.

I get by with a little help from my friends...

Thanks to RS, I now know where to paste the html code so you can see that I did successfully get my Rollyo and my Library Thing widgets onto my blog.

I do think the Shelfari has a nicer looking display, however, so I may add to that rather than keep the LibraryThing "shelf."

Finished Playing

It is the morning of Week Six and I have just finished my Week Five playing with mixed success. As noted in the previous post I enjoyed Library Thing immensely and found that Rollyo was very useful. You can look at my list on Rollyo titled Training 4 Libraries and it did a good search of the sites I had chosen to find lots of customer service classes.

The mixed successes (or more specifically failures) came when I tried to do a magazine cover and when both Rollyo and Library Thing said I could cut and paste the code to my webpage to provide a link. I did copy both sets of code but couldn't figure where to paste it into my blog.

I know it is possible because I have seen it on other blogs (Bird lover-could you help me?)

Library Thing

I am thoroughly enjoying hanging out on the LibraryThing website. It's not that I have an extensive library of books to "catalog." My "home" library is a constantly rotating collection of regular library books; used paperbacks purchased from Friends' sale tables and my husband's favorite used book stores; and miscellaneous mysteries from my mother-in-law and my sister.

It is actually the groups that I am finding so interesting. I immediately checked out the Mystery group (after dutifully adding my 5 books). What fun to find others who love Amelia Peabody but aren't so fond of Vicky Bliss (both characters created by Elizabeth Peters)! And to discover that I hadn't finished all of the China Bayles series last year but that there were two new ones published last year.

I have been scanning the Mystery,Thriller group on the topic of Favorite Detectives. I will add my own list to that shortly.

On to Week Five

It took a handy hint from Chris to help me find my RSS feeds last week. After editing a few of them out again, I now have just five ranging from the BBC news to the recipe of the day (barbecued tofu, anyone?).

I browsed a few library blogs but find that I really miss the one done by Walter Minkle (who was here for training day in 2007). His focus was on Youth Services issues but I really liked his insight on reading and libraries in general. Speaking of insight, I'm following several of you here on 27 Things and am constantly impressed with thoughtful comments.

Still Trying to Master RSS

I thought I subscribed to quite a few RSS feeds yesterday but I really wasn't sure where they were supposed to show up. However, when I clicked on the word Dashboard (something I hadn't noticed previously) and scrolled down a bit, I saw a list of the blogs I was following. I still think I may be missing some of the things I subscribed to.

What was more fun was finding the Shelfari widget on a friend's blog. I thought it was so neat that I started one of my own and bumped off the Flickr slide show. I generally read 2-3 books a week (Long ride twice daily in commuter bus and little interest in TV) so I probably won't keep it up to date.

a 27 Things Wordle

Just saw a description of Wordle in another SPL blog so went to check it out. If the link below works, you should be able to see my 27 things Wordle.

I actually just copied and pasted the first two paragraphs of the introductory blog (Thing #1) into the Wordle application. Oddly enough it came out in library colors.

http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/775561/27_Things

Happy Earth Day!

Enjoy the tree slide show from Flickr. I also discovered that another Add Gadget was how to get pictures in. So here is one of my favorites I used to illustrate the EDEN timesheet training. I've framed it with the motivator app from Big Huge Labs.

Flickr mashups

I've been playing with some of the Flickr mashups over the last few days but so far haven't been very successful at saving them and getting them into this blog or anywhere else. I'll need to play a little more at home where I have many more great photos available. I'd bring my camera to work but I don't know where the USB connecting cable is located. I did just add a Flickr slideshow on trees(clicked on Add a Gadget in the Layout tab) but would still like to get some of my own pictures up here.

Learning from Each Other

Thanks to Lori's suggestion, my title is looking better (when I have a chance, I will work on centering it). It occurs to me that this is what the 27 things program is really about - learning from each other. As the semi-official registrar, I am happy to report that we have 76 people signed up in the first week. We even have a few of our friends and customers signed up!

Formatting in my Favorite Thing

Okay, I really like this new template I've chosen and I think the picture really enhances the theme. I figured out how to change the color of Library Learning but I can't figure out how to move it or the picture so it is more readable.

First Official Blog of my 27 Things

I can't say that I'm a first time blogger but this is the first one I set up on my own. I thought I'd go on to thing #3 this week so that I would have a place to record the things that I am learning about and practicing.

I really liked the 7 1/2 Lifelong Learning Tips presention I looked at yesterday. One of my goals is to acquire and learn to use the Articulate tool that was used to make that short demo. I'm on e-mail list for Articulate (Tom , the E-learning Guy) and find the tips very useful.