Thing 18 Audiobooks

I enjoyed Farrell's article. Listening to books has always been popular. My kids enjoy listening to CD books. However! I'm not into listening to books. Don't even own an MP3 or iPod device. Students have asked about the option of audio books but they seem to download or access Overdrive in private so I've not seen what it can do. They are sooo sneaky, those students.

Thing 17: Social Cataloging

I am not a cataloger at heart. Alphabetical by title suits me just fine. For a librarian I do not own a huge collections of books, but that's because I use my public library. The big collection at my house is movies and music. I can't tell you how many CD but they've all been downloaded into iTunes. But what about my movies? I'm going to be looking for something like LibraryThing...MovieThing maybe? Sorry I have no links to share but my library uses it to promote new books, so here's the link to that:

http://www.nvcc.edu/annandale/library/newbooks.htm

Thing 16: E-Books

Love e-books! At my previous job, e-books made up the bulk of the collection. New material could be made accessible quicker than having to handle a hard copy. Searching was easier, multiple users, all that good stuff. I think it has a place in any good vibrant collection.

That being said--I am not a fan of APA books. It's a very busy search screen and somethings that should be there are not. Does anyone see how you limit your search to full text? Some may call that feature "lazy" but I prefer "efficient". And the "Narrow Result" column? Wow! To me, this database seems overdesigned. I suppose I will get used to it but right now it's a chore.

E-books are growing in popularity especially as the catalog lists and links to these books. It's nice that they are not sequestered off some place.

I do not own a dedicated e-book reader and I do not wish to. The footprint of a Kindle is too large. I just have no interest in such a device. Every time I see that ad showing two people relaxing on a beach with their readers, I think "You better not drop those suckers in the sand or the water!"

Thing 15: Creative Commons

Is this 10 years too late? Wasn't this the entire idea behind the web? I love the idea that there is an easy way for people to identify things they can use in projects or in artwork. But that's assuming the symbols are understandable. After staring at them and viewing all the you tube videos, I'm not sure I could identify or define the symbol. Would I put my stuff up on Creative Commons like photos? Probably not.

Thing Eight Screencasting

Because of security settings, I can not download Jing or Screencast-o-matic. I plan to do a casting at home. Not sure about my topic but maybe I'll do one on using Ask a Librarian. Or maybe on setting up a NetLibrary account. On the positive side, I love bitly! I use it quite often now. Next step is to get used to using Google Docs!

Update: I did get Jing and practiced a bit with it. Quite easy to use! I've not recorded any audio yet mostly because I don't have a script. My first "official" video will be using the e-journal finder.

Week 13--Online Surveys

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PDTQ2NP

I wonder if this will work. My previous job used Survey Monkey all the time to collect statistics. It seemed pretty easy to open and close the survey and collect the statistics.


Click here to take survey

Will this work? I had trouble following the instructions on posting a Google Doc to the blog.

Week 11--shortening a url

I see this working when you need to push pages to a person via e-mail. If the url is too long, it may not get copied correctly. Is it one step too many? There are some things I find myself willing to do but others that seem like too much bother.