One More

So I had to do a final post, because I started this project early. I chose thing 3, the RSS feed thing.

I use my RSS reader daily (Google Reader), to follow blogs and websites I like, and to see what things my friends are making. What I like about them is that everything's in one place, I don't have to gallivant around the web, checking if a new post or item has been added to different pages. I've begun to look at like a custom newspaper or magazine, and things that I would not seek out and read on their own, like comics and funny stories, become like additional sections, something to break up the monotony of a series of long articles.

The End?

I've finished with my 23 things training at this point, and it's been fun. A lot of the web apps that we've been introduced to I've used before, but I've enjoyed revisiting things that I had previously dismissed.
I think that it is great that we did this program, I think that it is important for us to be able to use, or at least be familiar with a wide variety of tools for connecting with our co-workers. Sometimes I think that we often don't take advantage of many of the tools that might make our work day simpler, and do things just because they are familiar, or comfortable to us.
I would take advantage of another program offered that was like this one. Tech improvement and training is, frankly, fun. I think that this program could focus more on applied skills, with proposed processes replacing more genaral ones.
I probably won't use this blog ever again, but many of the tools that I used here I will continue to use here, like my RSS reader.

Keeping Up

I plan to keep up with the "web 2.0" tools, because I have to. The world changes very fast, and new forms of communication come and go, but in order to stay connected in my chosen field of study I should stay on top of what it now. I perceive librarians as often being on the forefront of new forms of communication, hacking out missives in what ever new form comes along. And this is a good thing. These tools are just that, tools. They do not shape what we do, we shape what we do with them. I've found some of these tools to be very useful. I keep up with facets of the world through an RSS reader, I communicate via SMS, e-mail, and IM everyday. And doing 23 things has given me a reason to try some tools that I never felt I had a need for, like a blog or LibraryThing. It renewed my use of del.icio.us.
One tool that I find useful is Yahoo Pipes. This an aggregator and feed builder. It's good for mashing up content from all around the web. It's got an incredibility steep learning curve, and I'm not very handy with it yet, but the things that you can do with it are amazing. Things like this pipe, that creates an RSS feed out of a mashup of search engine results. It's a tool with a lot of uses.

Survey Monkey

For this blog entry we were asked to use Survey Monkey to make a survey. It seems like a powerful enough tool, and if I wanted to make a online survey I might use it. But I like paper surveys better. I think that I give more time and thought to my answers, and don't just enter what ever I am thinking about at that moment. I have to compose my answers before starting to write.
I could see this tool being useful for reaching a large group of people or a group that is geographically spread out, but interoffice mail work for me. I think the best thing about this is that you don't have to type up the responses by hand, but I think that's a really good way to get a feel for the data, and start to develop conclusions before you do any formal analysis.
I played with the tools, and found that they were powerful, but I didn't have anything that I wanted to ask. I don't think that this takes advantage of the medium that it is presented in. With a online survey you can have much more media rich prompts, most of these were text. And the answers are not just limited to text either, you could have people drag around product designs and arrange them by preference or really by anything. People could build their own logos, based on elements that you give them. There's a lot of things that you can do with online media.

Library Thing!

ibrary thing is a way to organize your books and share them with others. I've known about it for a while, but never felt like it was something I had any need for. For personal use, it seems to be more for people who own a lot of books, or are looking for social recommendations. I think it really shines as a tool for small libraries to get cataloged, to get some kinda tiny PAC. My friend uses it for that purpose, for her library: Paper Fort.

Paper Fort is a fledgling zine library that already has about 550 titles cataloged, and hundreds more to do. Right now the collection will be displayed at Rhino's but the lady who runs it, Sparky, has been looking for a permanent space to house it. It's going to be really sweet to see it all sorted and displayed.

She uses LibraryThing in the way that makes sense to me. It seems like a powerful PAC replacer, and for small libraries could be invaluable. But it doesn't have to replace a catalog, it could be used to add additional functionally to a system; I think we could benefit from using LibraryThing.

One of the great things about LibraryThing, is the sheer number of tags on each item. It is another way to search and find what you are looking for. Tags are great because the people who actually used the system, and the items, put in words or phrases that they thought were good descriptors of the book. You don't have to rely on one person's, or a group of people's opinion on what the book is, one person doesn't have to decide where it gets classified, but that decisions is made as a group, a shared decision about what it is, and what else is like it.

I like wikis. I think that they are great for collaboration and sharing information. I've used them in the past for classes and they really did help. One of the things that I want to do here at the library is have a circulation wiki that is useful. On LInt we have a very underutilized wiki, I want to make it better. One of the things I see for circulation is a cross linked meeting notes (like this) knowledge base. We could also have things that people find useful, but don't warrant an inclusion on the LInt pages, like this list of addresses in Monroe county.
we could have better formatted notes, and have them be really searchable. Things that we talked about in more then one meeting to the next could be joined. Discussion could occur on a page behind it, like this. We could use pages like this to have discussions about the nitty gritty of policy. I like them more then blogs for the library. I think that once a style is established it would make discustions easier to follow then a threaded system. I want to be able to find what I am looking for, and I can't really with the current system. The search on LInt is hard to use, and I don't know if I'm finding good info or outdated policy and most of what I do get returned is unrelated. I think that it could be so much better.
I feel that one of the most talked about concerns that people have with wikis is the freely editable nature of them. That if we put these things up, someone is going to change what they say. I don't think this is an issue. I think that we can trust people enough to be responsible with the access and ability to edit things. If there are things that people don't want messed with, like the policy manual, then we can lock it down and restrict who can edit it. All changes could be submitted to a "keeper" and they would be the ones to make the changes. But I think that that is too much, unless their is a problem. We wouldn't need to do this from the start. Because f people were ever malicious and messed with policy, we can see what they did because every post, every change, is signed and dated and archived automatically. If someone abuses the system we will know who did it, when they did it, and what they did. And what they did can be reverted with a click of a button. People who abuse it could have their editing privileges removed. But I don't think it would ever come to that. We've got a great group of people working here and I don't think that they would do that.

Doc War!

vs.

I like the idea of cloud based storage, having the files I want only a internet connection away. While it is frustrating when I cannot connect to them, not having to spend any effort to move them makes up for it. Sharing and having multiple people updating the same document. I wouldn't store sensitive information on it, but I don't like to store that kind of thing electronically at all.

Google Docs is a tool that I have used in the past for collaborating with people on group projects. I've always like the ease of use, I never had any trouble with the UI. One of the real reasons that I use it, and why I am and reluctant to switch, is because it seems like everyone is on it. The amount of users has reached a critical mass, where the technology seems to have become ubiquitous. It like at the web2.0 lecture during staff day, where fax machines only became useful when everyone seemed to have them.


Zoho Writer is the other tool that we were asked to try out. From the beginning, I liked it. I didn't have to make another sign in, I could use my already existing Google account. And the features look great. They had many of the tool I use when collaborating online, all in one place. And the writer had a many more tools then Google Docs. Unfortunately, nothing seemed to make this such a better option that I wanted to move my data to their service. It's good, and if I had discovered this first I might be using it instead of Google Docs, but for now, until I need to use it for something, I probably won't look at it again unless I have too.

If our founding fathers could grasp the implications of being able to freely share and work together on projects with out having to be in the same geographical space, I think they would vandalize Wikipedia.